The Whole Wide Beauty

Katherine Freeman is a living a conventional life: married with a small child and working as a part-time teacher, she has drifted far from her former life as a dancer. Burying the nagging sense that part of her has gone missing, she navigates the world in a dream, drawn one way then another by those who depend on her.

David, her aging father, has secrets of his own. His desperate drive to raise funds for a Poetry Foundation in the Lake District covers up his sense of what is missing. Disappointed by his daughter's abandoning of her artistic life, he has no idea how much they have in common.

Then, Katherine meets Stephen Jericho, a talented poet and friend of her father's. They embark on an affair which is less about them than about passion itself, sexual passion but also an elemental connection with life.

In this powerful debut, Emily Woof addresses the human need to engage. Her unique descriptive talent has the ability to make the reader look afresh at even the most familiar things. This is a brilliant novel about life's choices: love and marriage, art and commerce, ideals and compromise.