Book Of The Month March, 2007
The Whole World OverJulia 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.
What We Think
Meg Wolitzer, author of The Position recommends:
‘I will be taking a bunch of books with me this summer that have nothing in common, including Julia Glass’s new novel The Whole World Over, which looks like a big, satisfying, old-fashioned kind of novel with many characters. Also in the suitcase will be Henry James’s The Ambassadors, which I am ashamed to say I’ve never read, and which I am supposed to read for a book group. (I had angled for the more familiar, safe territory of Portrait of a Lady, but was outvoted.) And also in that suitcase will be David Sedaris and the new Curtis Sittenfeld, as well as the pre-publication copy of a thriller called The Interpretation of Murder, about Sigmund Freud solving a crime in old New York. These books should keep me off the streets until September.’
Meg Wolitzer’s previous novels include Sleepwalking, This is Your Life, Surrender Dorothy and The Wife. Film rights for Surrender Dorothy have been sold to Sony, with Diane Keaton to play the leading role. She is married, with two sons, and lives in New York.