Awards
Winner of the 2002 National Book Award for Fiction
From Powells.com
When forty-six-year-old Julia Glass beat out young and much vaunted authors such as Alice Sebold, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Adam Haslett for the National Book Award in 2002, novelist and awards judge Bob Shacochis commented, "Three Junes is an anti-hip book, an anti-cool book. It was like choosing a twenty-five-year-old single-malt whiskey." He went on to say, "I couldn't put it down because it had such emotional power." Glass admits that emotional power came from working through issues in her own life, and deciding to write about "how we live past heartbreak, heartbreak that we're never going to get over, heartbreak that will be stratified in our hearts forever." In beautiful prose honed on exquisite reading habits (she cites George Elliot, Dubus the Elder, and Alice Munro, among others, as inspiration, if not influences) and a genuine love of language, Glass tells the story of three characters; a father, his son, and a young widower whose presence in both men's lives makes a significant impact. Told in three parts during three separate Junes spanning ten years, Three Junes watches these three characters love, grieve, suffer loss, and move through their own tragedies. These tragedies are sometimes quiet, but their collective impact is profound. Fellow award-winning author Richard Russo joined many of Glass's fans when he proclaimed: "Julia Glass's talent just sends chills up my spine; her novel, Three Junes, is a marvel." Georgie, Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Three Junes is a vividly textured symphonic novel set on both sides of the Atlantic during three fateful summers in the lives of a Scottish family. In June of 1989, Paul McLeod, the recently widowed patriarch, becomes infatuated with a young American artist while traveling through Greece and is compelled to relive the secret sorrows of his marriage. Six years later, Paul’s death reunites his sons at Tealing, their idyllic childhood home, where Fenno, the eldest, faces a choice that puts him at the center of his family’s future. A lovable, slightly repressed gay man, Fenno leads the life of an aloof expatriate in the West Village, running a shop filled with books and birdwatching gear. He believes himself safe from all emotional entanglements—until a worldly neighbor presents him with an extraordinary gift and a seductive photographer makes him an unwitting subject. Each man draws Fenno into territories of the heart he has never braved before, leading him toward an almost unbearable loss that will reveal to him the nature of love.
Love in its limitless forms—between husband and wife, between lovers, between people and animals, between parents and children—is the force that moves these characters’ lives, which collide again, in yet another June, over a Long Island dinner table. This time it is Fenno who meets and captivates Fern, the same woman who captivated his father in Greece ten years before. Now pregnant with a son of her own, Fern, like Fenno and Paul before him, must make peace with her past to embrace her future. Elegantly detailed yet full of emotional suspense, often as comic as it is sad, Three Junes is a glorious triptych about how we learn to live, and live fully, beyond incurable grief and betrayals of the heart—how family ties, both those we’re born into and those we make, can offer us redemption and joy.
Review
"Readers may be reminded of Evelyn Waugh and, especially, Angus Wilson by the rich characterizations and narrative sweep that grace this fine debut....Glass makes it all work, though the parts are not uniformly credible or compelling. Nevertheless, a rather formidable debut." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"The artful construction of this seductive novel and the mature, compassionate wisdom permeating it would be impressive for a seasoned writer, but it's all the more remarkable in a debut....In this dazzling portrait of family life, Glass establishes her literary credentials with ingenuity and panache." Publishers Weekly
Review
"Many undercurrents and emotions run through this mesmerizing novel....Brimming with a marvelous cast of intricate characters set in an assortment of scintillating backdrops, Glass's philosophically introspective novel is highly intelligent and well written." Elsa Gaztambide, Booklist
Review
"A warm, wise debut....Three Junes marks a blessed event for readers of literary fiction everywhere." San Francisco Chronicle
Review
"[A] strong and memorable debut novel....Alternately joyful and sad, this exploration of modern relationships and the families people both inherit or create for themselves is highly recommended for all fiction collections." Library Journal
Review
"Julia Glass's talent just sends chills up my spine; her novel, Three Junes, is a marvel." Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls