Three Junes

A Novel

By: Julia Glass

Narrated by: John Keating

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.

©2002 by Julia Glass
(P)2002 by Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"Julia Glass' talent just sends chills up my spine; her novel is a marvel." (Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls)
"Has the rich pleasures of a 19th-century novel and the rush of New York life of the last ten years. I'm amazed it's a first novel - it is a mature, captivating work of fiction." (John Casey, author of The Half-life of Happiness)
"Almost threatens to burst with all the life it contains...extraordinary." (Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours)

Great Performance, Wonderful Book

I so much enjoyed listening to the "Three Junes". The narrator was excellent and really added to the pleasure of the text. He used multiple voices, accents and intonations that helped to give each character distinct identity and personality in the way that maintained a good deal of interest in a book containing a significant amount of dialogue.

The story itself is a fascinating one with multiple levels and complexities that made it suspenseful even without much of a plot--it's more of a character and issue study and a rumination on fate. Yet I continually looked forward to getting into the car to hear more. The Three 'Junes' are three separate views of the same family/experiences/perspectives narrated by three different individuals whose lives and fates are interwoven at three different instances in time, always in June.

I highly recommend this book whose literary quality is rare among books published today for its discussion of major moral issues in a way that suggests the original purpose of the novel as it developed to its height in the 19th century. It provides multiple ways of seeing the same issue among parents and children, siblings and friends, and pushes one to step into the shoes of another on 'big issues' in such a way as to sympathize with even the most disagreeable character. Unlike much modern literature stuck at being a text about a text, the book addresses the moral issues of our time as they are lived by normal people who nonetheless live the 'examined' life.

A true modern classic

Three Junes is hands down one of my favorite books of all time. My paper copy of it is worn form being reread, and I was excited to experience it in audio form. I'm so happy I did - the narration was perfect, and added such a great new depth to Glass' writing. Mal is my favorite character in the book, and I found myself anxiously listening for him to show up often extending my listening past my commute to take in more of the story. It's a wonderful listen, and a life-changing book - I can't recommend it enough!

Excellent book, iffy reader....

While a little confusing in its backing and forthing over time, this is a well written book dealing with complex family and other relationships in a subtle way.But the narrator's accent almost made me give up near the beginning(I'm glad I didn't...) The accent, intended to be scottish, constantly slithers into irish and back again, with frequent anomalies that seem to be neither. I'm English with a Scottish son-in-law and Irish friends; if you're not well acquainted with either accent, the narrator may not bother you (he reads well apart from the accent prob.) If you are, however, listen to the sample first to ensure this won't drive you mad!

Mind What Ypu Loves

A rich narrative of complex people whose stories overlap. Life is not simple; it is complicated, sad, unfair, funny, serendipitous, hard, lonely, and punctuated by moments of joy and undercurrents of sincere love. I look forward
to reading more about these wonderful characters.

Beautiful Narration of a Wonderful Story!

Delightfully written, true to life & completely believable characters make this the best "read" I've had in a long time. The narration with the brogue really completes it. My only complaint is that the book goes from past to present & back again very frequently & can be hard to follow (especially at first, till you figure out what's going on). It doubtlessly would have been easier to follow on paper.

Honestly, this has been my best find here, I highly recommend it!

Way better than I expected

Some of the reviews here made me hesitate, but I thought I'd give the book a try. I am so glad I did. I am now on my second listen, just to savor it again.

Ms. Glass has written some of the most original and apt metaphors that get at the true meaning of an experience. For example, she describes a character's (Fenno's) feeling when he finally discovers that he has been making a long-term mistake in having a relationship with someone (Tony): she describes him as having been drinking water for so long only to learn, late, that it was really just saltwater. Another metaphor describes the "epileptic" flashes of TV light seen from outside a window. Those are metaphors that make me say "yes, yes! that's true!"

The people who won't like this book are probably 2 types: a) they just don't normally relate to gay men, and don't want to (one gay man's complicated friend/family/love life is the central "middle" story here); and b) they don't want to have to do the mental work of paying attention to which time period the story currently is situated in. It is a bit hard at times, but I didn't find it too complicated; there are always enough clues. The book works better this way, too: by taking you into the future just a bit, you can pre-appreciate the impact of the past even before you have fully experienced the past.

Let me just say, too, that this may be the first "gay men in NY during the AIDS crisis" story that I have "read" in which I truly, truly cared for the characters and felt myself moved to tears.

Absolutely the best of everything--

This is absolutely the best audio book I have ever heard! The narrator's ability to change accents and voicing to match characters brings them to life as well as any cinematic representation could ever hope to. This is a perfect example of an audio-book's superiority over a movie-interpretation. Not only does it not have to be edited, but it can unravel at the author's intended pace. That the book weaves time and isn't perfectly linear seems to confuse listeners who have no concentration; for me it was a delight to revel in the author's finely wrought story-telling and wonderfully constructed characters. I regretted that it ended. A fantastic experience. I have and will continue to recommend it to anyone who loves a beautiful story well told.

A Deep Exploration of Family and Desire

Would you listen to Three Junes again? Why?

The narration is superb.

Any additional comments?

Two general assertions here: 1) This is a beautifully written book, and 2) I did get distracted a couple times while reading it. This is good enough to warrant more undivided attention than I had for it, but you can only give what you have to give.

That aside, the heart of this three-part novel is stunning. The first section moved perhaps too quickly for me, and the third felt somewhat disconnected (more on that in a moment), but the lyrical second part is absolutely worth it. Glass writes with real ease, inviting you into her world with effective and efficient portraits. Her characters are all fully realized; whether she grants us access to their thoughts or simply has someone observe them, they all feel worthy of their place in the story.

Fenno, the closest we have to a protagonist, is a gentle and thoughtful man. Glass’s depiction of him, his hopes, and his disappointments is one of the most insightful explorations of homosexual love I have ever encountered. There’s nothing titillating, nothing particularly strange for someone with a heterosexual background; it’s just a beautiful rendering of a man’s yearnings and the way he has reconciled himself to the life he has found.

It may just be me, but Fenno reminds me somewhat of John Corrigan from Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin. Both are caught in the swirl of New York, and both cling not so much to tradition but to a decency they fear might be lost. Fenno is not quite so inspired, but he is wrestling with a similar dynamic in a quieter way. He finds comfort in the people he is able to help, and he finds a kind of love in the animals of his life – a feisty parrot and a dog his mother bred from a line of champions. And he makes a life for himself, giving support to his family, and establishing a book store that becomes an enduring part of the community.

I fear my lack of attention may have cost me most in the first section. We get a lot laid out, and, in particular, we meet Fern, who vanishes again until the third section. I confess I missed that connection, and it’s at the heart of my mild discontent with the final section.

As I read the first two sections, I found this a novel about family, about the ways we influence each other even as we pursue our separate lives. It’s jarring but effective to meet the family through their father’s eyes and then to explore it further through Fenno’s. We come to ask questions about the nature of family: who constitutes it? Is a “friend” family? Is Malachy, dying of AIDS and too sardonic for a full relationship, Fenno’s lover? His American brother? The full partner he never had? How is he closer to his American friends than to his Scottish family?

The book implies answers to all those questions, and that’s it’s real joy. So, when the third section moves not just from Fenno and the McLeods as a whole but to Fern, it’s disconcerting. I realize now that I missed Fern’s connection to Fenno’s father, but even so, I wanted the novel to deal more fully with the McLeod family dynamics as altered by Fenno’s agreeing to help his brother have children.

Glass is simply too skilled not to have a reason for what she’s doing, and I have come to think she is so challenging the notion of what “family” means that she is suggesting it can often turn on relationships its participants don’t even know. (Fenno never learns, for instance, that Fern knew his father.) There’s a lot to think about there, and I admire its ambition, but it leaves me thinking the novel may have taken a bit of a wrong turn as it came down the home stretch.

There’s still very much to recommend this, and I plan on getting to more of Glass’s work one of these months.

I didn't want it to end

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

I would recommend this to most of my friends, if they listend to audiobooks. This was my first audiobook and I really enjoyed listening to it while my local NPR station was doing pledge breaks.

What was one of the most memorable moments of Three Junes?

I enjoyed the whole book after I got used to the shifting between time periods and places.

Have you listened to any of John Keating’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

This was the first narration by John Keating for me. I thought that he did an excellent job. his characters were all distinct and I enjoyed the different accents.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

I don't know about listening to it all in one sitting, but I didn't want it to end. Months later I find myself wondering how Fenno is doing.

Delightful

I like stories like this--stories about what my high school teacher called "the human condition".

And then when you hear it expertly narrated by John Keating, you are actually smitten. A wonderful thoughtful read and listen.

Months and months after totally being absorbed by this book as a listen, I found the (alas) unread print version of it on my shelf. I'm glad I didn't cheat myself of this book in any form.