First published 2024
Simon runs the barbershop his father and grandfather owned before him. At forty-something, he keeps few customers, takes espresso breaks upstairs in his apartment, and swims three times weekly beneath posters of his childhood swimming heroes. He accepts the quiet loneliness that threads through his days. Everything changes when a writer who comes for haircuts asks about Simon's father. Simon knows only that his father died in a 1977 plane crash on Tenerife, but the writer's questions make him realize how little he actually knows about that death. Meanwhile, Simon helps his mother teach swimming to teenagers and meets Igor, a mute boy who stirs unexpected feelings in him. As Simon falls in love with Igor, he also begins investigating his father's mysterious past. His carefully ordered life starts moving faster than he ever wanted. Bakker tells the story of a man forced beyond the boundaries of everything familiar as he searches for truth about his father and grapples with his growing need for human connection.
Genres: literary-fiction, mystery, contemporary, family-drama
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Tenerife
Period: 1977
285 pages · Hardcover · Suhrkamp Verlag