Indigo Best Book of 2024!

The second novel by Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Michelle Winters teems with hot towel shaves and the steady thrum of female rage.

Spurred by adolescent trauma, Louise adopts a life of hardcore punk violence until she stumbles into a job at a mysterious men’s hair salon, where her unique relationship with her clientele shows her a more perfect world—or so it seems. When that world is overturned, she flees to a marina on the East Coast, where she lives free from reminders of her past—except the duffle-bagged ones she jettisons nightly in a forsaken cove. But on the day of the Tragically Hip’s 2016 farewell performance in Kingston, a man surfaces from the Bay of Fundy, rousing long-dormant urges and giving Louise an unexpected gift: the chance to make things right.

Funny, warm, and furious, Hair for Men is a subversive exploration of gender, forgiveness, and chucking convention.

Michelle Winters is a writer, painter, and translator from Saint John, N.B., living in Toronto. Her written and visual work stretches the limits of the probable, explores the lushness of the industrial, and anthropomorphizes with gay abandon. Her stories have been published in THIS Magazine, Taddle Creek, Dragnet, and Matrix, and she was nominated for the 2011 Journey Prize. I Am a Truck is her debut novel.

Michelle Winters' profile page

• Commended, Indigo Best Book of 2024

“Dark, comic, strangely endearing.” — The Miramichi Reader

“Revolutionary cuts and gendered introspection … Hair for Men is a reassuring, funny, sometimes tragic read that reminds us possibilities exist for as long as we do.” — Chicago Review of Books