num_pages: 416
description: In a historic farmhouse outside Boston seventy-year-old Percy Darling is settling happily into reading novels watching old movies and swimming naked in his pond. His routines are disrupted however when he is persuaded to let a locally beloved preschool take over his barn. As Percy sees his rural refuge overrun by children parents and teachers he must reexamine the solitary life he has made in the three decades since the sudden death of his wife. No longer can he remain aloof from his community his two grown daughters or to his shock the precarious joy of falling in love. One relationship Percy treasures is the bond with his oldest grandchild Robert a premed student at Harvard. Robert has long assumed he will follow in the footsteps of his mother a prominent physician but he begins to question his ambitions when confronted by a charismatic roommate who preachesand begins to practicean extreme form of ecological activism targeting Bostons most affluent suburbs. Meanwhile two other men become fatefully involved with Percy and Ira a gay teacher at the preschool and Celestino a Guatemalan gardener who works for Percys neighbor each one striving to overcome a sense of personal exile. Choices made by all four men as well as by the women around them collide forcefully on one lovely spring evening upending everyones lives but none more radically than Percys. With equal parts affection and satire Julia Glass spins a captivating tale about the loyalties rivalries and secrets of a very particular family. Yet again she plumbs the human heart brilliantly dramatically and movingly.
language: English
title: The Widower's Tale
publisher: Pantheon