Three Junes

Winner, National Book Awards 2002 for Fiction

ISBN 9780385721424
Pantheon (Random House, Inc.)
Julia Glass, author photo, 2002
Julia Glass

Intending to become a painter, Julia Glass moved from her home state of Massachusetts to New York City, where she lived for many years, painting in a small studio in Brooklyn and supporting herself as a freelance editor. Three Junes(2002) was her debut novel. More about this author >

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A luminous first novel, set in Greece, Scotland, Greenwich Village, and Long Island, that traces the members of a Scottish family as they confront the joys and longings, fulfillments and betrayals of love in all its guises.

In June of 1989 Paul McLeod, a newspaper publisher and recent widower, travels to Greece, where he falls for a young American artist and reflects on the complicated truth about his marriage.

Six years later, again in June, Paul’s death draws his three grown sons and their families back to their ancestral home. Fenno, the eldest, a wry, introspective gay man, narrates the events of this unforeseen reunion. Far from his straitlaced expatriate life as a bookseller in Greenwich Village, Fenno is stunned by a series of revelations that threaten his carefully crafted defenses.

Four years farther on, in yet another June, a chance meeting on the Long Island shore brings Fenno together with Fern Olitsky, the artist who once captivated his father. Now pregnant, Fern must weigh her guilt about the past against her wishes for the future and decide what family means to her.

In prose rich with compassion and wit, Three Junes paints a haunting portrait of love’s redemptive powers.

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