A boy looks into a water trough and sees his own face. "There you are," he says. It will take him forty-seven years to say it again.
Wil is eleven when a travelling painter teaches him that a smile can be sold.
He grows up to become a gilder, covering people in gold so the world will see them as they would rather be seen. The work makes him wealthy. While Wil perfects the faces of others, he slowly loses sight of his own.
His sister writes. His wife waits. His daughter learns exactly where she sits in her father's ledger.
At the rail of a ship, a child asks him a question he cannot answer: Who keeps yours?
A story of identity, belonging, and the selves we learn to perform, The Gilder is a fable about the face we are given, the one we learn to sell, and finding our way back to the first one.