This portrait of a dried-out marriage - the fatigue wrought by career-building,the advent of children and the calluses of ingrown emotion - is sharply drawn. Finishing the book is like leaving behind a little neighbourhood of the mind, full of open doors and closed doors, the imperfect and the kind - but a place to which everyone is trying to find a way home.

Greenie Duquette lavishes most of her passionate energy on her Greenwich Village bakery and her four-year-old son, George. Her husband, Alan, seems to have fallen into a mid-life depression, while Walter, her closest professional ally, is nursing a broken heart. It is at Waiter's restaurant that the visiting governor of New Mexico tastes Greenie's coconut cake and decides to woo her away from the city to be his chef. For reasons both ambitious and desperate, she accepts - and finds herself heading west without her husband. This impulsive decision, along with events beyond Greenie's control, will change the course of several lives around her.

The Whole World Over is a vividly human tale of longing and loss, folly and forgiveness, revealing the subtle mechanisms behind our most important, and often most fragile, connections to others.