The whole wide beauty - Emily Woof

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. His intense passion for his work masks a complicated inner world, and his already fraught relationship with Katherine is further threatened when she falls in love with his young colleague, Stephen Jericho. Stephen and Katherine risk everything as they are explore the extremes of their passionate connection.

In this powerful debut, Emily Woof uses her unique descriptive talent and spare prose to examine the human need to engage. This is an exceptional novel about life's choices: love and family, 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.