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Title details for The Whole World Over by Julia Glass - Available

The Whole World Over

by Julia Glass
Ann Marie Lee
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
From the author of the beloved novel Three Junes comes a rich and commanding story about the accidents, both grand and small, that determine our choices in love and marriage. Greenie Duquette, openhearted yet stubborn, devotes most of her passionate attention to her Greenwich Village bakery and her four–year–old son, George. Her husband, Alan, seems to have fallen into a midlife depression, while Walter, a traditional gay man who has become 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 will change the course of several lives within and beyond Greenie’s orbit. Alan, alone in New York, must face down his demons; Walter, eager for platonic distraction, takes in his teenage nephew. Yet Walter cannot steer clear of love trouble, and despite his enforced solitude, Alan is still surrounded by women: his powerful sister, an old flame, and an animal lover named Saga, who grapples with demons all her own. As for Greenie, living in the shadow of a charismatic politician leads to a series of unforeseen consequences that separate her from her only child. We watch as folly, chance, and determination pull all these lives together and apart over a year that culminates in the fall of the twin towers at the World Trade Center, an event that will affirm or confound the choices each character has made—or has refused to face.
Julia Glass is at her best here, weaving a glorious tapestry of lives and lifetimes, of places and people, revealing the subtle mechanisms behind our most important, and often most fragile, connections to others. In The Whole World Over she has given us another tale that pays tribute to the extraordinary complexities of love.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    May 23, 2006

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781415944356
      • File size: 661688 KB
      • Duration: 22:58:30

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Listen to this audio performance for one minute and hear why Glass is a National Book Award winner. The author's elegant prose unfolds petal by petal, allowing each character to bloom slowly. Similarly, the setting reveals itself with rich imagery that, thanks to Ann Marie Lee's lyrical voice, nearly turns an audiobook into film. As the story shifts between a restaurateur and a pastry chef, the delicious kitchen descriptions adeptly keep up with the beauty of the language itself. Lee's performance captures the beauty and tragedy of everyday life and its relationships, triumphs, and challenges. The combination of Glass's skill and Lee's voice makes for a beautiful audio experience. L.B.F. (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from February 27, 2006
      In her second rich, subtle novel, Glass reveals how the past impinges on the present, and how small incidents of fate and chance determine the future. Greenie Duquette has a small bakery in Manhattan's West Village that supplies pastries to restaurants, including that of her genial gay friend Walter. When Walter recommends Greenie to the governor of New Mexico, she seizes the chance to become the Southwesterner's pastry chef and to take a break from her marriage to Alan Glazier, a psychiatrist with hidden issues. Taking their four-year-old son, George, with her, Greenie leaves for New Mexico, while figures from her and Alan's pasts challenge their already strained marriage. Their lives intersect with those of such fully dimensional secondary characters as Fenno McLeod, the gay bookseller from Three Junes
      ; Saga, a 30-something woman who lost her memory in an accident; and Saga's Uncle Marsden, a Yale ecologist who takes care of her. While this work is less emotionally gripping than Three Junes
      , Glass brings the same assured narrative drive and engaging prose to this exploration of the quest for love and its tests—absence, doubt, infidelity, guilt and loss. 200,000 first printing; 12-city author tour.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Julia Glass's second novel explores the psychological intricacies that twist motives, form expectations, and reveal the depth and nature of relationships. Denis O'Hare narrates Greenie and Alan's story as they weather the ennui that follows years of marriage, middle age, "and all the natural shocks." Greenie takes their son and leaves Alan, New York City, and her best friend, Walter, a gay man with his own love problems, and heads to New Mexico to work for the governor. O'Hare never lets events slip into soap opera. From larger-than-life governor to conscientious aide, from precocious 4-year-old to brain-damaged young woman, O'Hare's cool yet engaging voice avoids sentimentality while still allowing each character his or her humanity. O'Hare's performance and this first-rate abridgment treat Glass's novel with care and respect. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      July 10, 2006
      When an author uses the same characters in more than one novel, the audio performance can be accurately compared. Fenno, a gay man who emigrates from Scotland to New York's Greenwich Village, is for many readers the most endearing character in Julia Glass's first novel, Three Junes
      , read by John Keating, who captured the cadences and charm of Fenno's native land. O'Hare, in contrast, produces a rather vague accent that could be Irish or Scottish. He also endows the New Mexico governor with a Texas accent, though the heartiness with which O'Hare portrays him is perfect. Despite these flaws, O'Hare has an eloquent, easy-to-listen-to voice that covers the large canvas of Glass's novel handily. He does particularly well with the main couple, Alan and Greenie, and O'Hare's rendition of their four-year-old son, George, is marvelous. It's a shame that the audio is not available unabridged through retail outlets. (Books on Tape, a division of Random House, has a 23-hour unabridged version on audible.com.) While condensation may work well for Campbell's Soup and tomes that are improved by having their windy digressions clipped, Glass's novel was one of the most wonderful reads of the summer and didn't need editing. Simultaneous release with the Pantheon hardcover (Reviews, Feb. 27).

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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