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    Three Junes: A Novel
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    Three Junes: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Three Junes: A Novel
    Audiobook14 hours

    Three Junes: A Novel

    Written by Julia Glass

    Narrated by John Keating

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateApr 22, 2003
    ISBN9780739304907
    Unavailable
    Three Junes: A Novel

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    Reviews for Three Junes

    3.5/5

    1,227 ratings61 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I like having long, interesting and pleasant stories for audiobooks - they lull me to sleep. This long rambling family story mostly centered on a middle aged Scottish man named Fenno fit the bill. Unfortunately, the reader's soothing accent did not translate to the dialog of the American characters.
    • 4/5
      At the center of the sweet and emotional "Three Junes" is Fenno, a somewhat isolated and yearning man in NY. Fenno's father loses his strong-willed wife, and lives in an emotional fog, or extreme emtional myopia. Hi finds out late, lamentably, unacceptably late, that Fenno is gay. "Three Junes" has a complicated reproductive urge running through it; one of the very important conclusions of this story is that Fenno donates sperm so that his sister-in-law can become a mother. This is a woman toward whom Fenno had an actual sensual impulse years before. Fenno's father is not immune from the urge, either, and makes somewhat of a fool of himself over Fern, a much younger woman.This is the story of the emotional growth and fulfillment of our three principal actors - Fenno, Fern, and Fenno's dad. Tony serves as somewhat of a catalyst, if such is proper for this story. He's a bisexual who has been intimate wth both Fenno and Fern. He is capricious, ingratiating, and gorgeous, and will not be got rid of. At length, you comprehend that no one really wants to be rid of him."Three Junes" is touching, effective, and transporting. We come to value these main players, and hope things turn out for them. This is excellent, a fulsome journey. It led me to other work by this wonderful author.
    • 3/5
      Entertaining story about a women who owns a pastry shop in NYC. She is having marital issues and decides to take a job in Santa Fe and a chef to the governor. This is a great food book (especially when it comes to desserts) and an entertaining story but is a bit superficial overall. Thoroughly entertaining, though. I wanted to know what would happen in each of the characters lives.
    • 5/5
      A beautiful book with wonderful characters, whose fascinating stories interweave in such a lovely way. Excellent writing and well worth its National Book Award.
    • 3/5
      This was like wading through molasses, but not in a bad way. I enjoyed the character development, when it existed, the language, the discourse, the descriptions. I was able to almost get in the skin of certain characters and feel their anger, lust, angst, frustration, but then I got so bogged down in their anger, lust, frustration. I just couldn't move through this book. It felt as if every page took an hour and I am not sure why. When I finished the book I just keep thinking "Why?" It all came together, sort of, maybe, but why? I felt cheated, as if my extraordinary effort to persevere did not count, But why?
    • 4/5
      Read this not long after it was published. While shopping in a local thrift shop a few months back, I found a copy of the book. Since I couldn't remember much of the story, I decided to read it again. Glad I did.
    • 2/5
      I tried so hard to finished this book. But I keep on dozing off. So after 3 chapters I'm giving up. And I'll just marked this off as finished so I would never pick this book up from the library ever again.
    • 4/5
      This book is one of my most favourite reads in a long time. Glass did a tremendous job creating interesting characters and wove them expertly into a subtly strong novel. It is certainly a character driven work that uses different themes and memories to tie it together. I enjoyed that each section (there are three) was from a different character's point of view. I was surprised by whom Glass chose to use as the focus for part three, but it worked very well and did complete the arc of the story. This isn't a neat, sweet story. It is funny, sad and challenging (in parts) and you are hoping the best for each character. The connectivity that is created through main characters who prefer solitude it terrific.
    • 3/5
      This book was slow and hard to commit to. One of the narrators, Fenno, is a fussy, grumpy, uptight Scot who really grated on my nerves. I couldn't find anything too likable about him, until the end of the story when his character shows some growth, or maybe I just got to see him in a different light and that made the difference. I loved that readers learn of characters' misinterpretations of other characters' lives, but the characters themselves don't ever find out the truth, no matter how badly we might want them to. It would be tempting, I think, as the author to spell it all out, but Glass doesn't, and I appreciated this realism.In the end, I think this is a complex novel, beautifully written, but it just didn't come together quite right for me.
    • 4/5
      This novel paints a detailed portrait of a single Scottish family. Told across three critical Junes, it explores the death of father and mother as seen through the perceptive eyes of their eldest child. It's a book about death, life, family, children, love and forgiveness. Have you ever read a book that became so real, you actually find yourself believing that the characters exist? Like you've found a window into the intimate thoughts of a stranger? That is the sort of book this is. The McLeod family leaps from the page and into your thoughts.
    • 3/5
      Disappointing. Almost gave up near the end. Give up on this author if this is her best
    • 5/5
      A book in three parts, of which the first is good, the second brilliant and the third a bit of a let down, but I had such a great time reading it I could not possibly give it less than five stars. The second part with its forensic analysis of its characters smallest thoughts and interactions was quite superb. Loved the small moments of humour (“from which military junta???”) and the interplay between the characters. Here is an author who knows her setting and its people inside out. The writing was absolutely top quality throughout, with the unusual backdrop of sheepdog breeding proving impressively earthy and tactile in the first section, followed by the deliciously claustrophobic second section. The third enabled a storyline to be rounded off, whilst adding an element of circularity to the novel as a whole. So glad to learn that there are more books out there about these characters.
    • 5/5
      A reread for book club. I'd largely forgotten the details but have carried Fenno and Plume (and Mal) with me for many years. My best friend Karen and fantasize about having a store like Plume. The world of the MacLeods reminds me a bit of Kate Atkinson's Life After Life.
    • 5/5
      Rich, rich, RICH characters! I loved the structure of the novel, which I won't spoil. I loved the struggles shown on different levels of characters that were all interrelated... I liked seeing different viewpoints of the same issue. I appreciated that not all the characters were meant to be liked. The action was compelling, and the narration and the prose supported it very well but not in a pushy way. I finished wanting to know these people, and have them as friends. Great story.
    • 2/5
      I couldn't finish this one. The characters are so dry.... The story didn't hold me.
    • 2/5
      I tried to get into this book but couldn't, like trying to get into a soap opera already in progress. I didn't like the author's style of introducing characters/plot. I waited to "catch on" and get interested but I never did.
    • 1/5
      Read this book for book club. Well, at least I tried to. Could not get into it.
    • 3/5
      It's more of a 3.5 or even 3.75. The writing is, as Julia Glass' writing usually is, beautiful. It's really a collection of three stories, hence "Three Junes." The same family appears in all three but the central characters are not always the same. In fact, in the final story, two of the sons play a big part but the lead is a female we first met in the first story when the father had a brief infatuation with her. There are marvelous characters and an examination of almost every kind of relationship you can imagine. The narrator of the second story is a gay man in the time when AIDS was first ravaging the gay community and there is much discussion about life and death and love in ways that most books don't deal with.
    • 5/5
      Rich, rich, RICH characters! I loved the structure of the novel, which I won't spoil. I loved the struggles shown on different levels of characters that were all interrelated... I liked seeing different viewpoints of the same issue. I appreciated that not all the characters were meant to be liked. The action was compelling, and the narration and the prose supported it very well but not in a pushy way. I finished wanting to know these people, and have them as friends. Great story.
    • 3/5
      This is the story of a family told in three parts: the three Junes of the title. In part one, the father, recently widowed, takes a cruise to Greece. The second part tells the story of the eldest son and his friend, Mal; gay men living in New York and their respective families. Finally, part three ties the stories together five years on. Well written, good characters, but it jjust didn't grab me. Maybe a bit too "made for TV movie"-type plot? Some stereotyping of secondary characters? Hard to say why this didn't work as well as it could have.
    • 3/5
      This book was slow and hard to commit to. One of the narrators, Fenno, is a fussy, grumpy, uptight Scot who really grated on my nerves. I couldn't find anything too likable about him, until the end of the story when his character shows some growth, or maybe I just got to see him in a different light and that made the difference. I loved that readers learn of characters' misinterpretations of other characters' lives, but the characters themselves don't ever find out the truth, no matter how badly we might want them to. It would be tempting, I think, as the author to spell it all out, but Glass doesn't, and I appreciated this realism.In the end, I think this is a complex novel, beautifully written, but it just didn't come together quite right for me.
    • 2/5
      Good writing...but i just couldn’t get interested! There were too many ‘perspectives’; ant it was challenging to know who was in focus. I just didn’t get it!
    • 3/5
      Felt like I OUGHT to like it more, but so much of it just plodded...
    • 4/5
      This writer is simply very very good. Her use of time shifting is dramatic and effective. I did not know that tsome of the characters in "Three Junes" also appear in "The Whole World Over". I unfortunately read them in reverse order.
    • 4/5
      If this hadn’t won the National Book Award in 2002, I’d tell you it was a women’s novel, and a mediocre one at that. I might still tell you that.Three summers (1989, 1995, & 1999) in the life of a Scottish family, in Dumfries & in NYC. There are some expressive observations about death (“Everyone dies alone, no matter how many people there are in the room”); and life (“Time plays like an accordion in the way it can stretch out and compress itself in a thousand melodic ways”) but overall, I wasn’t satisfied with any of the character development, and there was little plot to speak of.Read this if: you like cause-and-effect parent-and-children stories; or you like things tied up in a neat bundle. 3½ stars
    • 3/5
      In the manner of movies like "Babel" and "Crash", novels like "Let the Great World Spin" and "Beautiful Children", but I found the opening--the father's story on a tour of Greece--felt like an editor's suggested add-on. And the closing section tried to tie up too many things--and, though relatively short, added a number of new characters. The centre--the relationship between two gay men and the family around both--was enough, probably, although Colm Toibin did it better in "Blackwater Lightship".
    • 4/5
      Wonderful. Almost a five-star rating except that I just didn't connect well with the narrator in the third part.Don't let any blurbs or synopses put you off. I expected to find the whole Greece-Scotland-New York thing contrived, but it works. Also feared that it might end in a *too* neat little resolution at the end, but Glass wisely avoided the lure of the tidy.
    • 4/5
      I thought the "Junes" were girls' names but the "Junes" are months set apart by several years. Each June section relates the events in the lives of a Scottish family. There are frequent flashbacks as we gradually learn about the marriage and deaths of the parents. He is an editor and owner of a small newspaper and she is a dog breeder who seems to care more about her dogs than her sons. The lives and loves of the three sons are explored. The oldest son owns a bookstore in New York and struggles with is homosexuality and, the other two are twins one of whom is a vet whose wife is unable to get pregnant, and the other is a chef whose French wife has produced 3 girls. This is a beautiful and lyrical novel.
    • 4/5
      I'm not quite sure what to think of this book. It's beautifully written and very subtle in its genius. However, it might have been a little too subtle and was left feeling as if I had missed something during the reading (which I most likely had). The thing I liked best about the characters are that they are unique in their ordinary-ness. Fenno, who could be argued is the main character, is in many ways everyman, looking for acceptance from his family, friends, and life. Fern's reentry into the story in the last part was jarring, but also fit.
    • 3/5
      This book sounded like a nice family saga, told in three parts. It actually is sort of a family saga, but the three parts are all lacking something. The first part, told by the father, was a bit vague, with this older guy inexplicably falling in love with a young girl. The second part, about the son, would have made a novel by itself, were it not that the main character is not really likeable. The third part was redundant, as the readers and the son don't get any answers, and the narrator didn't really relate to father and son.I would recommend reading this book if you see it in the library or can borrow it, but don't spend too much money on it.