A Day and a Night and a Day

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.

Publishers Weekly

British writer Duncan's cerebral, propulsive seventh novel (after The Bloodstone Papers) digs with philosophical intensity into the timely question of what makes both a terrorist and a torturer tick-with a twist: the terrorist is Augustus Rose, an African-Italian-American former journalist turned successful New York restaurateur. Rose, recruited during his naïve youth into an international organization that practices "vigilante democracy," is imprisoned in Guantánamo, where Harper, an efficiently cruel U.S. operative, interrogates him, providing the main thread of the novel's three plot lines. The second recounts Rose's complex romance with Selina, which blossomed in 1968 when he was age 21 and ended three decades later with her death in a Barcelona bombing. The third sees a post-torture Rose retire to a bleak British island where he's awaiting death, until he's drawn into the violent world of a girl who befriends him. Duncan describes physical pain and emotional anguish with dramatically distilled, merciless prose, all the while carving a wondrous love story out of a tragic contemporary world where torture has become a numbing norm. (Jan.)

Glen Duncan is the critically acclaimed author of six previous novels, including Death of an Ordinary Man; I, Lucifer; and, most recently, The Bloodstone Papers. He lives in London.