The Whole World Over

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

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.