Three Junes

Julia Glass is an American novelist and a painter. She was born in Boston, grew up in Lincoln, Massachusetts, attended Concord Academy and graduated from Yale. Her novel, Three Junes, won the National Book Award in 2002. This cleverly constructed debut novel is written in three parts, each set in the month of June. It is written in a flashback narrative style and tells the story of a Scottish family over a span of ten years. In the first portion we are introduced to Paul McLeod, newly widowed and traveling through Greece. Fenno, Paul’s oldest son narrates the next section, he is a gay man living in New York and so fears AIDS that he avoids intimacy altogether. The final section centers on Fern, a young woman whom Paul admired while in Greece. Glass writes with unparalleled honesty and vividly constructed scenes, making it strikingly clear that those we love are often people we may not like at certain times.