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  • Published: 1 June 2007
  • ISBN: 9780099502142
  • Imprint: Arrow
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 528
  • RRP: $35.00

The Whole World Over




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.

  • Published: 1 June 2007
  • ISBN: 9780099502142
  • Imprint: Arrow
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 528
  • RRP: $35.00

About the author

Julia Glass

Julia Glass was a 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. Her first novel, Three Junes, won the 2002 National Book Award for Fiction. Her books since then include The Whole World Over, I See You Everywhere, and The Widower’s Tale. Until recently a longtime New Yorker, she now lives with her family in Massachusetts.

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Praise for The Whole World Over

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