Mr. Gwyn

The celebrated author Jasper Gwyn suddenly and publicly vows never to write another book. But as his life veers into isolation and emptiness, he decides to become a "copyist," holding 30-day sittings with clients as he writes their portraits. In these portraits Gwyn illuminates surprising, sometimes beautiful, sometimes frightening corners of the sitters’ souls. The rich access they grant the disaffected Gwyn to other people, particularly to his business manager, the fair-haired Rebecca, also poses a startling question: what might happen if a vacant heart were suddenly crowded with the complications of love?

Three Times at Dawn explores this question while leaving greater mysteries in its wake. A man and a woman — the same couple in each case — meet in a trio of hotels; first she is a seductress, he a traveling salesman; on another night she is young and pregnant, while he is old and haunted by his past; finally, she is middle-aged, and he is a child whose life is already marked by tragedy. As their third dawn together draws to a close, Baricco delivers one of modern fiction’s most powerful statements on the heart and the will, on kindness and the destiny that falls light as a shadow over every human life.