Three Junes

Hardcover
from $0.00

Author: Julia Glass

ISBN-10: 0375422412

ISBN-13: 9780375422416

Category: Gay & Lesbian - Families

Search in google:

An astonishing first novel that traces the lives of a Scottish family over a decade 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.The New YorkerThis enormously accomplished début novel is a triptych that spans three summers, across a decade, in the disparate lives of the McLeod family. The widowed father, a newspaper publisher who maintains the family manse in Scotland, is chary, dogged, and deceptively mild. Fenno, the eldest son, runs an upscale bookshop in the West Village, and his most intimate relationship -- aside from almost anonymous grapplings with a career house-sitter named Tony -- is with a parrot called Felicity. One of Fenno's younger brothers is a Paris chef whose wife turns out pretty daughters like so many brioches; the other is a veterinarian whose wife wants Fenno to help them have a baby. Glass is interested in how risky love is for some people, and she writes so well that what might seem like farce is rich, absorbing, and full of life.