Looking, and What It Does to the Looker
Take a seat in a Paris café and the city starts handing you information you never asked for. A couple at the next table stops talking. A man checks his phone twice and leaves his coffee. You assemble a story from those fragments in seconds, and you will never learn whether any of it is true.
Jeremy Bradley-Silverio Donato has built his fiction around that gap. An American author who moved to Paris in 2019, he describes the city as a place where people live alongside one another in cafés, streets and apartments while staying private.
“Living in Paris taught me to pay attention to what people reveal accidentally,” he says.
The watcher’s licence
Novelists earn a living from that kind of attention, and Bradley-Silverio Donato sees the city as an ideal school for it. “The city gives you endless opportunities to observe people without ever really knowing them, which is fertile ground for fiction,” he says.
The second half of that sentence carries the weight. Watching gives the observer material. Knowing stays out of reach. A writer fills the distance with invention, and for a novelist that is the job. The trouble starts when a person treats the invention as knowledge.
His mainstream debut stays close to that trouble. Three Days Grace, published by Indigo River Publishing on 12 May 2026 and distributed by Simon & Schuster, brings five people together in a Paris hotel for 72 hours. They know one another through family history, and the novel puts that knowledge under strain. The Independent Review of Books wrote that readers enter “each of these characters’ wounds and defense mechanisms”, and the defences in a family hold up because everyone has learned to look at everyone else in the agreed way.
Families can watch each other for decades and still misread one another. Bradley-Silverio Donato has said that people are rarely one thing, and that two people can remember the same relationship in different ways. A family offers you the closest view of another person available, and it can mislead you all the same.
The looking turns around
The author’s next book takes the question further. His next novel is with his publisher, and he is keeping its title and most of its details private. He has described its concerns in one sentence.
“The next novel is concerned with the difference between seeing someone and imagining that you know them.”
He has also said the book deals with observation and obsession, and with the point at which looking at another person starts to change the person doing the looking. He gives no plot beyond that, and none belongs here.
The idea is old and uncomfortable. You watch someone long enough and you begin arranging your days around the watching. The picture you hold of them sharpens while they stay as unknown as on the first day. Your own life starts to bend toward a person who may not know you exist.
Readers of Three Days Grace will recognise the ground. Three Days Grace dealt with what people hide from those closest to them. The next novel, on his account, turns to the person who believes he can see past the hiding, and to the price of that belief.
A city that trains the eye
Paris supplies the habit in daily doses. The author lives in a city of terraces facing the pavement and windows facing other windows, a city that arranges its inhabitants as an audience for one another. A resident learns to read strangers fast and to accept that the reading will stay unconfirmed.
His own remarks sketch a working method: notice what people let slip, and treat certainty about another person as the thing to question. On his description, the next book follows the cost of losing that doubt.
For a writer whose mainstream debut won Silver in Fiction at the 2026 Living Now Book Awards, the shift sets a steep challenge, and the next book will show whether the watcher can write the cost of watching from the inside.
Jeremy Bradley-Silverio Donato is an American novelist who has lived in Paris since 2019. Three Days Grace is published by Indigo River Publishing and distributed by Simon & Schuster.
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