The Widower's Tale (Center Point Platinum Fiction)

In a quirky farmhouse outside Boston, seventy-year-old Percy Darling enjoys a vigorous but solitary life. To help his oldest daughter through a crisis, he allows a progressive preschool to move into his barn. The transformation of his refuge into a lively, youthful community compels him to reexamine the choices he's made since his wife's death three decades ago. He can no longer 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. Though they begin as pranks, they escalate insidiously, with dire consequences for Robert's family and the people around them.

Julia Glass is the author of Three Junes, winner of the 2002 National Book Award for Fiction; The Whole World Over; and I See You Everywhere, winner of the 2009 Binghamton University John Gardner Book Award. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her short fiction has won several prizes, and her personal essays have been widely anthologized. She lives in Massachusetts with her family.