The Whole Wide Beauty - Softcover

Katherine Freeman has drifted far from her life as a dancer. Married with a small child and working as a part-time teacher, she has become distant from her life, navigating the world in a dream, drawn one way and another by those who depend on her. Her father David is the charismatic director of the Broughton Poetry Foundation in Northumberland.

Woof, who has written plays since her early 20s, grasps how understatement can be just as powerful as baroque, highly stylised prose. While the romantic yearnings of a middle-class mother might not be wholly original territory, this is far from chick-lit; instead, it demonstrates a well-tuned sensitivity to the complications of human existence. --Observer

From actress Emily Woof comes an impassioned story of artistic ambition, clandestine desire and the meaning of marriage...a persuasive first novel. --Daily Mail

Woof writes in simple, spare sentences, but there is poetry too in the way that she reveals the presence of the extraordinary in the everyday. She shows a tremendous versatility: moments of social comedy are placed alongside scenes of love, longing and loss. An air of melancholy at missed opportunities hangs over all of the characters, but this moving and haunting novel is also full of humour and warmth. --Daily Telegraph