Readers and critics tend to greet a debut by asking what comes next. Jeremy Bradley-Silverio Donato has his next novel with his publisher already, and he has started on a larger question of his own.
“I’m starting to think less in terms of the next book and more about the body of work I want to leave behind,” he says.
The book that started the count is Three Days Grace, published by Indigo River Publishing on 12 May 2026 and distributed by Simon & Schuster. It gathers five people in a Paris hotel for 72 hours, and the visit turns into a reckoning with what the family has never said. Bradley-Silverio Donato is an American author who has lived in Paris since 2019.
Different surfaces
A body of work asks a writer to hold two commitments at once. The books need enough in common that a reader can follow a mind from one to the next, and enough distance that the reader does not feel handed the same story twice.
“I want each novel to feel different on the surface but recognisably mine underneath.”
The next novel tests that principle early. He describes it as quite different from Three Days Grace, with a more Mediterranean, sensual atmosphere and a darker psychological undercurrent. He keeps the title and most details private, and he points to continuity in the questions beneath it: desire, identity, perception, and the gap between how we see ourselves and how others see us.
The surfaces already differ. Rainy Paris gives way to Mediterranean light, and a family under a deadline gives way to a book about observation and obsession. The questions underneath have travelled with him.
The preoccupations
Bradley-Silverio Donato has named the territory he means to keep working. He wants to build a body of literary fiction around identity, desire and transformation, and around the tension between the self a person sees and the self other people see.
He also wants his books to be distinctly queer without being confined to a single definition of queer fiction. In his description, the novels can engage with sexuality and identity while reaching toward larger subjects, among them family, memory, beauty and ambition. Three Days Grace reads queer experience through a family drama and a fixed span of time. Another book in a different register widens the frame.
Critics have given him a starting point to build from. Kirkus Reviews called Three Days Grace “a dark, dramatic, and thoughtful reflection on the traumatic aspects of love and family.” Independent Book Review described “a quiet novel on trauma, loss, and the way secrets both kept and shared have long-lasting ripple effects.” The book took Silver in Fiction at the 2026 Living Now Book Awards. A reviewer coming to the next novel will arrive with those words in mind, and the author has signalled that he intends to keep some of their concerns and leave others.
Thinking in decades
Career talk in publishing often runs on the next deal and the next title. Bradley-Silverio Donato frames his ambitions on a longer clock. “Three Days Grace is part of a much longer journey for me as a novelist,” he says.
A long view changes the pressure on any single book. A debut no longer has to say everything, and a follow-up has no duty to repeat what worked. Each can take risks the other did not, so long as the preoccupations hold.
His stated aspiration stays modest in scale. He wants to keep writing books that stay with readers after they finish them. That ambition fits a writer counting in decades: a reader who keeps one of his novels in mind for years is the reader most likely to come back for the next.
Alongside the fiction he writes as a Forbes contributor and holds a degree from Oxford, but the plan he has described is a novelist’s plan. Two books in, he has named the ground, and the coming decades will show how much of it he covers.
Jeremy Bradley-Silverio Donato is an American novelist living in Paris. Three Days Grace, his mainstream debut, is published by Indigo River Publishing and distributed by Simon & Schuster.
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