The Hairdresser's Son

Multi–award winning Dutch author Gerbrand Bakker’s phenomenal new novel about grief and the unavoidable power of family ties.

Simon never knew his father, Cornelis. When his wife told him she was pregnant, Cornelis packed his bags, and a day later he was dead. Or everyone assumed he was dead; after all, he was on the passenger list of the KLM plane that crashed in Tenerife in 1977.

Simon is a hairdresser, just like his father and grandfather before him, but he is not passionate about cutting and shaving. ‘Closed’ appears on his shop’s front door more often than ‘open’, because every customer is a person, and people suck the energy from him. But there is one client he regularly interacts with: the writer. The writer is looking for a subject for his next book, and becomes captivated by the story of Simon’s father.

As Simon probes the mystery of what happened to his father, a deeply humane and beautifully observed portrait of loneliness emerges in another captivating novel from one of Europe’s greatest storytellers.

About the Author

Gerbrand Bakker was born in 1962. He studied Dutch language and literature and worked as a subtitler for nature films before becoming a gardener. Bakker won the 2010 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his novel The Twin (Vintage, 2009) and the 2013 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for his novel The Detour (Vintage, 2013).

About the Translator

David Colmer was born in Adelaide in 1960. Since moving to Amsterdam in the early 1990s, he has published a wide range of translations of Dutch literature. He is also a published author of fiction. Colmer has won many awards for his translations, most notably the 2010 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the 2013 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, both with novelist Gerbrand Bakker. In 2009 he was awarded the biennial NSW Premier’s Translation Prize for his body of work.

Reviews

"Bakker’s unhurried precision delivers an understated portrait of middle-aged loneliness, before a twist that probes the role of narrative indeterminacy in how we make sense of the world." —The Sydney Morning Herald

"To say that Gerbrand Bakker hasn’t forgotten how to write a novel would be an understatement. With The Hairdresser’s Son, he presents himself as one of the very best writers the Netherlands has to offer … With this vivid prose, he makes Simon fascinating, he makes him someone―perhaps the greatest and most loving thing a writer can do. For the reader this results in the almost magical illusion that is the most extraordinary (and, I believe, unforgettable) thing about this novel: the sense of having really seen someone. Gerbrand Bakker has written his characters to life." —NRC

"[E]nthralling in that although nothing feels invented, the pages still seem to exude something magical … Simply narrated scenes, terrifying and moving at once." —De Groene Amsterdammer

Dimensions: 12.9 x 2.08 x 19.8 cm