Author:Julia Glass
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.
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 OutIlluminating and clever
—— Good HousekeepingJust 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 TimesAn ambitiously realized tapestry of several intersecting lives.
—— Boston GlobeGlass' 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 TribuneAn extraordinary, irreducible fantasy
—— ObserverMurray Bail marshals the tensions between his characters and their ideas to great effect
—— Peter Scott , The TelegraphA gratifyingly dry wit pervades this novel of ideas
—— Chris Ross , The GuardianTruly gripping
—— Big IssueOpening with a mysterious yet distressing anecdote about a girl driving dangerously, Peter Ferry's first novel immediately captures the reader's imagination, drawing you into a story filled with humour, tenderness and suspense... The novel is as entertaining as it is intriguing and is not to be missed
—— AestheticaA very neat piece of storytelling
—— William Leith , Evening StandardA neat piece of storytelling
—— Johanna Thomas-Corr , ScotsmanA lovely and heartbreaking book . . . Julia Glass writes the sort of novels you wish would go on forever; such is your immediate attachment to her impeccably drawn characters . . . [she] offers up intimate examinations of the lives on complex people, recognizable for their insecurities and strengths, failings and successes, humor and sadness, loves and loves lost.
—— Miami HeraldAn arresting story that is both thorny and complex ... A wonderful novelist will expose truths that elude us in the everyday. [Glass's] eye in I See You Everywhere takes in blind spots and makes them mesmerizing
—— New York Daily NewsJulia Glass is a writer firmly in control
—— Dallas Morning NewsGlass elegantly captures what it means to be an independent and spirited contemporary woman
—— Chicago TribuneBeautifully written
—— Image MagazineIt is expertly written in its way, and oddly compelling - like a slushy movie you can't help but respond to
—— GuardianMoving and thoughtful ... Poignant and compelling, this lyrical novel lifts the veil on an internal world of love, rivalry and misunderstanding; an intricate depiction of sibling relationships
—— Good Book GuideA beautifully evocative and intelligent novel
—— Woman & HomeThis impassioned tale is a gripping read
—— James Smart , The GuardianJones is fabulous...offering titbits of danger and discord, yet keeping a cool matter-of-fact tone for the big horrors
—— Sunday TimesHer second novel is a must-read; a devastating, brilliant account of what happens when everything a man believes in...begins to crumble
—— Cath Kidson MagazineFull of danger and discord
—— Sunday Times Summer Reading