The Whole
Wide Beauty
Set in Cumbria, Arizona, and London, The Whole Wide Beauty is a novel about love, art, identity and a woman’s search for a life she can truly call her own.
Katherine is caught between the life she has built with her husband and child, and a deeper sense of who she once was. She becomes involved in a passionate affair and is forced to confront the choices she has made and the parts of herself she has lost.
"Passionate and devestating, I read it in one sitting."
Esther Freud, author of Hideous Kinky
Listen to a sample of the audio book
“
She shows a tremendous versatility…This moving and haunting novel is full of humour and warmth.
Daily Telegraph
“It calmed her to do it. She still loved the line the body could make… It depicted a thousand possibilities – a branch, a building, a refusal, a bid for emptiness. She held the posture for a moment, moved by how expressive it seemed, more than words could ever be.”
Reviews
“In The Whole Wide Beauty, Emily Woof untangles the threads of passion and loyalty, love and art that tie us together. What she gives us is a powerful novel that leaves us hopeful and inspired about our own lives.”
Ann Hood, author of The Knitting Circle
"An admirable, intense first novel,"
Adam Foulds, Guardian
"A debut novelist of the first order. She displays a poet’s eye for the arresting image…Woof’s writing has richness, complexity and embodies life force."
Financial Times
"In 'The Whole Wide Beauty', Emily Woof, who is also an actress, has managed to create a literary novel that comes to life like cinema in the reader’s mind. The dialogue is concise and sharp. Scenes unfold with startling clarity, moving the story forward, dipping into backstory here, memory there, like a movie, only it’s not. It’s an elegant prose fiction debut, a character-driven family drama about a young woman’s search for fulfillment in love, art and life."
Colin… The Tribune
Inspiration
After my father died, I found myself writing prose. I did not set out to write a novel, but I couldn't stop writing. I found myself stepping into the third person, writing a male character in his seventies, imagining his thoughts and fears and I realised I was trying to write my father back to life. I didn't give the prose I was writing a name. I referred to it simply as ‘The Thing’ but it took on a life of its own, and became THE WHOLE WIDE BEAUTY.
