The Whole World Over

(Paperback)

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Description

From the acclaimed author of the National Book Award-winning Three Junes comes a big, rich, commanding novel about the accidents both grand and small that determine our choices in love and marriage. Greenie Duquette lavishes most of her passionate energy on her Greenwich Village bakery and her four-year-old son, George. Her husband, Alan, seems to have fallen into a midlife depression, while Walter, her closest professional ally, is nursing a broken heart. It is at Walter's restaurant that the visiting governor of New Mexico tastes Greenie's coconut cake and decides to woo her away from the city to be his chef. For reasons both ambitious and desperate, she accepts - and finds herself heading west without her husband. This impulsive decision, along with events beyond Greenie's control, will change the course of several lives around her. The Whole World Over is a vividly human tale of longing and loss, folly and forgiveness, revealing the subtle mechanisms behind our most important, and often most fragile, connections to others.

Reviews

Finishing the book is like leaving behind a little neighbourhood of the mind, full of open doors and closed doors, the imperfect and the kind - but a place to which everyone is trying to find his way home. * Time Out *
Illuminating and clever * Good Housekeeping *
Just when the reader feels sure of an outcome, other forces are set to work, shifting the momentum in unexpected directions. This is particularly admirable because Glass is so unobtrusive a writer, conveying meaning not through insightful asides, philosophical musings or verbal pyrotechnics but through storytelling. * New York Times *
An ambitiously realized tapestry of several intersecting lives. * Boston Globe *
Glass' characters are enticingly complex; their predicaments are provocative and significant... While many fiction writers are either adept storytellers or precisionists in their rendering of inner worlds, Glass is both at once. * Chicago Tribune *

Author Bio

Julia Glass, winner of the National Book Award for her novel Three Junes, was a 2004-2005 fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and her short stories have been honoured with three Nelson Algren Awards and the Tobias Wolff Award. Until recently a longtime New Yorker, she now lives with her family in Massachusetts.