The Whole Wide Beauty

(, Main)

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Katherine Freeman has drifted far from her life as a dancer. Married with a small child and working as a part-time teacher, she has become distant from her life, navigating the world in a dream, drawn one way and another by those who depend on her.

Her father David is the charismatic director of the Broughton Poetry Foundation in Northumberland. His intense passion for his work masks a complicated inner world, and his already fraught relationship with Katherine is further threatened when she falls in love with his young colleague, Stephen Jericho. Stephen and Katherine risk everything as they are explore the extremes of their passionate connection.

In this powerful debut, Emily Woof uses her unique descriptive talent and spare prose to examine the human need to engage. This is an exceptional novel about life's choices: love and family, art and commerce, ideals and compromise.

Reviews

[A] stirring debut....Though Woof's English characters outwardly maintain the stiffest of upper lips, their tumultuous inner worlds make for a sensuous, moving drama of love and family.
An immensely readable novel ... marks her as a debut novelist of the first order.--Adam O'Riordan
Demonstrates a well-tuned sensitivity to the complications of human existence.--Mary Fitzgerald
I loved Emily Woof's novel. It stayed with me like a jewel while I was reading it, in the way the best books do. It's such a passionate and devastating look at love and loneliness.--Esther Freud, author of Love Falls and Hideous Kinky
In The Whole Wide Beauty, Emily Woof untangles the threads of passion andloyalty, love and art that tie us together. What she gives us is a powerfulnovel that leaves us hopeful and inspired about our own lives.--Ann Hood, author of The Knitting Circle
This is an admirable, intense first novel, serious and insightful ... I am excited to see what Woof will go on to write next.--Adam Foulds
Woof elegantly dissects the transactions of desire, individual and familial, in this disquieting novel.--Nikita Lalwani, author of Gifted

Author Bio

Originally from Newcastle, Emily Woof is a wellknown British actress. Her many film credits include the The Full Monty and the cult classic Velvet Goldmine. She has appeared in a variety of television dramas, including Miss Marple, and on stage in Neil Bartlett's production of Romeo And Juliet. She is also a prolific writer of drama for stage, screen, BBC Radio 4 and Film Four; in addition to writing she has also directed and starred in a number of these productions. This is her first novel.