by Julia Glass
First published 2014
Kit Noonan sits unemployed with twins to support and a mortgage weighing him down. His wife pushes him toward the one task he keeps avoiding: discovering who his father really was. Kit drives to Vermont to visit Jasper, his former stepfather who lives as a no-nonsense outdoorsman in the mountains. But Jasper cannot give him the answers he seeks. The truth lies with Lucinda Burns, married to a respected political figure and mother to Malachy, a journalist who died of AIDS. She and her husband alone know what really happened in an accident years ago. When Jasper brings Kit to meet Lucinda, the collision of past and present sends new shockwaves through multiple lives. The story moves from Vermont's peaks to Cape Cod's shores, drawing in Fenno McLeod, now in his sixties, whose own story Glass told in Three Junes. Kit's search becomes something larger than paternity. It becomes a reckoning with how the choices people make in youth echo across decades and how families form in ways no one expects.
Genres: literary-fiction, contemporary, 21st-century, family-drama
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, reckoning
Setting: Vermont, Cape Cod
Period: 21st-century
379 pages · Hardcover · Pantheon