The Widower's Tale

In a quirky farmhouse outside Boston, seventy-year-old Percy Darling enjoys a vigorous but mostly solitary life - until, in a complex scheme to help his oldest daughter through a crisis, he allows a progressive preschool to move into his barn. The abrupt transformation of Percy's rural refuge into a lively, youthful community compels him to reexamine the choices he's made since his wife's death, three decades ago, in a senseless accident that haunts him still. No longer can he remain aloof from his neighbors, his two grown daughters, or, to his shock, the precarious joy of falling in love.

Meanwhile, Percy's beloved grandson Robert, a premed student at Harvard, joins his visionary roommate in a series of environmental 'actions' targeting the well-to-do; they begin as pranks but escalate insidiously, with dire consequences for Robert's family and the people around them, including a Guatemalan gardener and a gay preschool teacher, whose lives intersect fatefully with those of the Darlings. With equal parts affection and satire, Julia Glass spins a powerful tale about the multigenerational loyalties, rivalries, and secrets of a family, inhabitants of a complacently prosperous world where no one is immune to unexpected change. Yet again, she plumbs the human heart brilliantly, dramatically, and movingly.


Genre: Literary Fiction