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.

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.

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.

An ambitiously realized tapestry of several intersecting lives.

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.

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.

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.

Three Junes

'Threatens to burst with all the life it contains.' Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours

Like Michael Cunningham's The Hours, which won the Pulitzer, Three Junes won its own prize (National Book Award) and deserves it-a highly accomplished and sensitive novel, all the more remarkable for being Julia Glass's first.

Free of gimmickry, Three Junes brilliantly rescues, then refurbishes, the traditional plot-driven novel.

Three Junes almost threatens to burst with all the life it contains. Glass's ability-would be marvellous in any novelist. In a first-time novelist, it's extraordinary.

Julia Glass was awarded a 2000 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in fiction writing and has won several prizes for her short stories, including three Nelson Algren Awards and the Tobias Wolff Award.

In this captivating debut novel, Julia Glass depicts the life and loves of the McLeod family during three crucial summers spanning a decade. Paul McLeod, patriarch of a Scottish family and a retired newspaper editor and proprietor, is on a package tour of Greece after the death of his wife. The story of his departure from the family home in Scotland and late gesture towards some sort of freedom gives way to his eldest son's life (Fenno). Fenno protects his heart by putting himself under emotional quarantine throughout his life as a young gay man in Manhattan. When he returns home for his father's funeral, this emotional isolation cannot be sustained when he is confronted by a choice that puts him at the centre of his family and its future. Three Junes is a novel about how we live and how family ties (those that we make as well as those that we are born into) can offer redemption and joy.

Julia Glass

The best novels entrance us by showing what is missed in life as much as by what's discovered; this is one.

Rich, intricate and alive with emotion ... Glass has used the edges and color blocks of her own life to build an honest portrait of sister-love and sister-hate

Louisa and Clem, the sisters at the very centre of this wonderfully vivid, truthful novel, are (as Louisa puts it) "not exactly soul mates. Historically we're kind of like England and France"... [a] quarter century of their lives unfolds, switching between their two voices, kept beautifully distinct by Glass.

The beauty of this story lies in its rich detail and the descriptions of the emotions and events that have shaped the sisters' complex relationship. A riveting and intricate read.

[A] promising extension of Glass's already impressive range

Glass is a wisely questioning, ardent, and artful novelist

Nowhere are the ebbs and flows, the complex and often ugly nuances, the bonds and breaks between sisters more achingly or more piercingly explored.

One doesn't read so much as sink into a Julia Glass novel, lulled into an escapist reverie by her mastery . . .

A sometimes stinging, always affecting tale of siblings who can't quite make it as friends

The voices of bookish Louisa and bold Clem - sisters 'as different as white chocolate and seaweed' - alternate in Glass's wrenching tale as the strong-willed sibs cope with love, loss and each other.

Glass writes with a bracing emotional and intellectual intensity, and . . . so accurately depicts the complexities of the sororal bond that it's no surprise to find that she hails from a sisterhood of two as well.

A 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.

An 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

Julia Glass is a writer firmly in control

Glass elegantly captures what it means to be an independent and spirited contemporary woman

It is expertly written in its way, and oddly compelling - like a slushy movie you can't help but respond to

Moving 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

A beautifully evocative and intelligent novel

Louisa and Clem: two sisters who love each other more the further they move apart 
 
Louisa is the elder one, the conscientious student, precise and careful, who yearns for a good marriage, a career, a family. Clem, the archetypal younger sibling, is the rebel: uncontainable, iconoclastic, committed to her work but not to the men who fall for her. 
 
Alternating between their voices, I See You Everywhere opens when the sisters are in their early twenties and unfolds through their lives in a vivid, heart-rending story of what we can and cannot do for those we love. Their complex bond, Louisa observes, is 'like a double helix, two souls coiling around a common axis, joined yet never touching.' 
 
Alive with the same sensual detail and riveting characterization that marks Julia Glass's previous novels, I See You Everywhere is a powerful and moving double portrait that reveals the very nature of sisterhood.

Julia Glass

Praise for I See You Everywhere

The best novels entrance us by showing what is missed in life as much as by what's discovered; this is one.

Rich, intricate and alive with emotion ... Glass has used the edges and color blocks of her own life to build an honest portrait of sister-love and sister-hate

Louisa and Clem, the sisters at the very centre of this wonderfully vivid, truthful novel, are (as Louisa puts it) "not exactly soul mates. Historically we're kind of like England and France"... [a] quarter century ...

The best novels entrance us by showing what is missed in life as much as by what's discovered; this is one.

Rich, intricate and alive with emotion ... Glass has used the edges and color blocks of her own life to build an honest portrait of sister-love and sister-hate

Louisa and Clem, the sisters at the very centre of this wonderfully vivid, truthful novel, are (as Louisa puts it) "not exactly soul mates. Historically we're kind of like England and France"... [a] quarter century ...

The best novels entrance us by showing what is missed in life as much as by what's discovered; this is one.

Rich, intricate and alive with emotion ... Glass has used the edges and color blocks of her own life to build an honest portrait of sister-love and sister-hate

Louisa and Clem, the sisters at the very centre of this wonderfully vivid, truthful novel, are (as Louisa puts it) "not exactly soul mates. Historically we're kind of like England and France"... [a] quarter century ...

Books by Julia Glass

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