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.

Born in Newcastle Upon Tyne, Emily Woof has written for stage, film and radio. Her plays include Sex III for the Royal Court, Revolver and Going Going for the South Bank Centre, and, for BBC Radio 4, Pianoman, Baby Love and Home to the Black Sea. She wrote and directed Meeting Helen for FilmFour, and directed the prize-winning short film Between The Wars. She has also worked as a trapeze artist and actor; her screen credits include Oliver Twist, The Full Monty, Pandaemonium, This Year's Love and Velvet Goldmine. Her first novel The Whole Wide Beauty was published to great acclaim in 2010. She lives in London with her husband and two children.