On the 2026 medalists page of the Living Now Book Awards, under Fiction, the Silver entry reads: Three Days Grace by Jeremy Bradley-Silverio Donato (Indigo River Publishing).
The novel came out on 12 May 2026 from Indigo River Publishing, with distribution by Simon & Schuster. It follows five people who gather in a Paris hotel for 72 hours. Bradley-Silverio Donato, an American author, has lived in Paris since 2019, and he set the book in the city he knows from the inside.
The Living Now result sits alongside a run of trade reviews that began in the spring and a list of further honours.
Three Days Grace won the LGBTQ+ Fiction category at the 2026 American Fiction Awards and a Silver award at the Readers’ Choice Book Awards. It also took three International Firebird Book Awards: first place in Contemporary Novel and in LGBTQ Fiction, and second place in New Adult Fiction. On Amazon, it has reached #1 in LGBTQ+ Drama & Plays in both the Kindle Store and Books.
The reviews that came first
The trade reviews set the tone. Kirkus Reviews called the book “a dark, dramatic, and thoughtful reflection on the traumatic aspects of love and family”, and placed its collisions “in the rainy streets of Paris”.
The Independent Review of Books, in a staff review on 1 April 2026, wrote: “Through rich prose that feels both urgent and effortless, readers are welcomed into each of these characters’ wounds and defense mechanisms.” Four weeks later, Addison Ciuchta at Independent Book Review described “a quiet novel on trauma, loss, and the way secrets both kept and shared have long-lasting ripple effects”, and added that “the writing style drips with meaning and emotion.”
YASS Magazine interviewed the author in April, and QueerAF produced a podcast episode in support of the book. Together with the medals, that coverage gives a reader several separate outlets to check against one another before buying a 210-page novel.
Another chance at readers
Bradley-Silverio Donato talks about the prizes in terms of reach.
“Awards are wonderful because they give a book another opportunity to find its readers.”
For a novel from an independent publisher, reach counts for a great deal. A medal on a cover or a line in a retailer listing gives a browsing reader a reason to pick up a title by an author they have never heard of, and a book that finds new readers stays in circulation longer.
He draws a line between what a medal does and what it cannot touch. In his account, a prize extends the life of a novel and leaves the reasons he wrote it unchanged.
Those reasons, as he describes them, have little to do with competition. “Ultimately, whether I’m writing fiction or nonfiction, I’m interested in what happens when people finally say the thing that has gone unsaid,” he says. Three Days Grace puts that interest under a deadline: a family in a hotel, a death that changes the purpose of the visit, and three days before two of them leave.
Alongside the novel he writes for Forbes as a contributor and holds a degree from Oxford, but the awards conversation, for him, comes back to the novel and its readers.
The book is available from Simon & Schuster and major retailers.
Jeremy Bradley-Silverio Donato is an American novelist living in Paris. Three Days Grace is published by Indigo River Publishing and distributed by Simon & Schuster.
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