Windy's Tales

In Windy's Hairdressing Salon, the professor, an old customer, has just settled down for a trim. "Even shorter?", asks Windy. "You really wanna look like a Marine, Professor? Got a grudge against your hair?" As she snips away, Windy chats about everything under the sun. About the wheelchair-bound minister who, as rumour has it, returned from the Vietnam War with shrapnel wounds below the belt, and about Judge Caldwell who was always after the young girls until he had his stroke. About her two husbands – Seth, who ended up in prison, and Walter, who disappeared with the trailer one day, leaving her to raise two daughters. About the tornado she barely survived, and Blue Hole, a deep ridge in the river that is said to lead to the Underworld. Local legend insists that Windy has second sight, and that, even as a child, she saw angels. Windy takes the professor and the reader from her Salon to a strange and mysterious twilight zone, drawing us deep into events that make the mind reel, raising existential problems and subterranean correspondences. This is a book that draws the reader like a magnet, with a suggestive power to rival Die Sache mit dem Hund (Tale of a Dog)