The Widower's Tale by Julia Glass

The Widower's Tale by Julia Glass

In a historic farmhouse outside Boston, seventy-year-old Percy Darling is settling happily into retirement: reading novels, watching old movies, and swimming naked in his pond. His routines are disrupted, however, when he is persuaded to let a locally beloved preschool take over his barn. As Percy sees his rural refuge overrun by children, parents, and teachers, he must reexamine the solitary life he has made in the three decades since the sudden death of his wife. No longer can he remain aloof from his community, his two grown daughters, or, to his shock, the precarious joy of falling in love.

One relationship Percy treasures is the bond with his oldest grandchild, Robert, a premed student at Harvard. Robert has long assumed he will follow in the footsteps of his mother, a prominent physician, but he begins to question his ambitions when confronted by a charismatic roommate who preaches--and begins to practice--an extreme form of ecological activism, targeting Boston's most affluent suburbs.

Meanwhile, two other men become fatefully involved with Percy and Robert: Ira, a gay teacher at the preschool, and Celestino, a Guatemalan gardener who works for Percy's neighbor, each one striving to overcome a sense of personal exile. Choices made by all four men, as well as by the women around them, collide forcefully on one lovely spring evening, upending everyone's lives, but none more radically than Percy's.

With equal parts affection and satire, Julia Glass spins a captivating tale about the loyalties, rivalries, and secrets of a very particular family. Yet again, she plumbs the human heart brilliantly, dramatically, and movingly.

Julia Glass's books include Three Junes, which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2002, The Whole World Over, and I See You Everywhere, which won the Binghamton University John Gardner Book Award in 2009. The National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study have all awarded her fellowships. Her personal essays have been frequently anthologized, and her short fiction has won several awards. Her family and she live in Massachusetts.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780307456106
ISBN 10	0307456102
Title	The Widower's Tale
Author	Julia Glass
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Alfred A. Knopf
Year published	2011-07-12
Number of pages	480
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.