A man's man with a curiocity for the perverse. Euripides has the sympathetic eye of one who has faced others' passions, foibles, and biases up close, in his barber shop mirror. A type of secular confessor, Euripides "lightens" his customers' soul by cropping their heads into a uniform short-back-and-sides and filtering their lives through a well-worn irony and working class ideology. The reader is invited to inhabit the space between Euripides and his customers, and to reflect on his or her own perspectives on the human drama that unfolds in this corner of a rapidly changing, urban Athens, a place of magical and deadly transformations. Where individuals from vastly different backgrounds are thrown together to comment on ignorance, compassion, guilt, death, illness, illicit desire, immigration, cannibalism - and share their pain, even if only in a glance or in hushed acknowledgement. From the pen of one of Greece's most celebrated novelists, nine magical short stories, in which - to echo Pablo Neruda - the smell of their barbers' shops makes us want to cry...