A Day and a Night and a Day: A Novel - Couverture rigide

In a windowless cell, a man hangs from a pair of handcuffs.

He is an american.

His torturer will stop at nothing to extract the information he requires.

He, too, is an american.

A Day and a Night and a Day is a Grand Inquisition for the twenty-first century, in which love, loyalty, reason, and truth are on trial, and morality hangs in the balance. It is the story of Augustus Rose, an unlikely operative in a terrorist network, and his interrogator, Harper, a ruthless ambassador for the darkest forces at work in our times.

Beyond the law and without hope of escape or reprieve, Augustus endures an emotional and physical assault that brings his whole life under brutal scrutiny: his race, religion, politics, and past, the people he has loved, and the few he is still desperate to protect. Alone and certain of death, Augustus raises the only shield he has: memory.

He remembers his outcast Euro-American mother, Juliet, whose erratic love was refuge from the unforgiving streets of Harlem in the 1950s; he recalls the strange solace of Elise Merkete, the ravaged vigilante who recruited him into the ranks of her underground army; he relives the cool touch of the young Spanish prostitute, Inés, perhaps the last female tenderness he's ever likely to know.

Outshining them all is the memory of Selina, a stunning, troubled, and rebellious white New York aristocrat. Their epic, taboo love affair, begun in 1960s Manhattan, would yield a lifetime's worth of passion, heartbreak, and wanderlust, leading Augustus from Harlem to Greenwich Village, from El Salvador to Barcelona, from Morocco to a bleak British island where death seems his only companion.

Dramatic, far-reaching, and beautifully written, A Day and a Night and a Day is both a piercing love story and a timely, harrowing evaluation of the shape the Western world is taking.

“Duncan can be clairvoyant about how people live now. . . . A Day and a Night and a Day . . . leave[s] you with the sense of having been brushed by something uncanny, so close does Duncan get to saying the unsayable. Bracing and original.” (New York Times Book Review)

“Thrilling, a probe deep into the heart of our age . . . bracing and original.” (International Herald Tribune)

“Imagery is a tool of seduction for Duncan, who is one of England’s best-kept literary secrets. And he wields it brilliantly . . . A Day and a Night and a Day is a triumph.” (Richmond Times-Dispatch)

“A gripping, entertaining read.” (Orlando Sentinel)

“A stunning new novel...I defy most readers to put it down.” (Cleveland Plain Dealer)

“[Glen Duncan’s] paragraphs are nothing less than accomplishments. A DAY AND A NIGHT AND A DAY....delivers an astonishingly heady and warm and enthralling read. This is the good stuff.” (Charles Bock, bestselling author of BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN)

“Gripping...the darkest and most convincing account of the idiocies, insights and horrors of the “war on terror” that I’ve yet read.” (Salon.com)

“This stunning novel contains equal doses of cruelty and beauty, rendered with language so precise that it reaches your nerves with both pain and delight. There are no lukewarm emotions in this novel, only the intensity of people perpetually on the verge (Dalia Sofer, bestselling author of The Septembers of Shiraz)

“Glen Duncan is one of the best English-language writers working today―smart and musical, funny and serious at once. A day and a night and a day is a good estimation of how long it will take you to gulp down this wonderful novel.” (Darin Strauss, bestselling author of Chang & Eng and More Than it Hurts You)

“Grim, violent and paradoxically elegant.” (Kirkus Reviews)