Three men. Three gifts. One life.
Boone is eighteen, and it is the summer of the rope swing. There is nothing in the world but a girl with a chipped tooth and the brown river below the cottonwood, until a pile of gravel comes down and sleep takes everything.
Dan sits in a recliner with his chest sewn shut, writing a letter to the son he hit. He is trying to explain thirty years of hunger: a diner grill, a café named for his mother, a marriage held together by two treaties, and the things he did while something else had the wheel.
Pop is seventy-nine, awake at three in the morning, wanting nothing in the world but sleep. Then a widow back from California laughs across a church basement, and something long buried turns over.
Gold. Frankincense. Myrrh. Food, desire, rest. Every man is handed all three in the cradle, and spends his life with them shoving each other for the front of the line.
Three Wisemen is a novel about what drives a man, and about what it costs the people riding in the car with him.
