Douglas Bruton – författare

'An ingenious book' —Stuart Kelly, Scotland on SundayOnce there was a street in Paris and it was called the Street of Tailors. This was years back, in the blue mists of memory. Now it's the 1950s and Henri is the last tailor on the street. With meticulous precision he takes the measurements of men and notes them down in his leather-bound ledger. He draws on the cloth with a blue chalk, cuts the pieces and sews them together. When the suit is done, Henri adds a finishing touch: a blue Tekhelet thread hidden in the trousers somewhere, for luck.One day, the renowned French artist Yves Klein walks into the shop, and orders a suit. Set in Paris, this atmospheric tale delicately intertwines three connected narratives and timelines, interspersed with observations of the colour blue. It is a meditation on truth and lies, memory and time and thought. It is a leap of the imagination, a leap into the void.

Edition #2 of Novella Expressfeaturing:• The Hardest Winter by Carole Hamilton• Heaven Burns by Jen McGregor• Just Like Him To Die by Douglas BrutonNovella Express is a book series publishing novellas submitted from around the world.CONTRIBUTING TO EDITION #2:Carole Hamilton writes stories which often focus on individuals who live in the fringes of our societyJen McGregor is a playwright who specialises in using horror tropes to explore painful experiences, and will tell anyone who holds still long enough about her journey from gothic heroine to monster.Douglas Bruton has won many prizes for his short fiction. His children''s novel, The Chess Piece Magician was published by Floris Books (2009); his literary fiction debut, Mrs Winchester''s Gun Club, was published by Scotland Street Press (2019); and Blue Postcards, longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2022, was published by Fairlight Books (2021).THE NOVELLAS IN EDITION #2:THE HARDEST WINTER by Carole HamiltonThe Hardest Winter by Carole Hamilton is a beautifully and realistically drawn novella, showing the hardships of farming life in Scotland today.Fiona and Drew live and work on a Scottish cattle farm. Beauty contrasts with the never ending chores and muck.Fiona is suffocated by the monotony of the endless tasks both in the farmhouse and outside. The continual preparation of meals, cleaning, feeding calves and helping with farm chores leaves her exhausted.Birth and death infiltrate her life till the harshest of winters with painful circumstances arrive. With this adversity there is always hope of a new future just as winter will always turn to spring.The ritual of the farming year, ploughing, planting and harvesting are linked to love, loss and new life. Fiona''s life is caught in this exquisite and intricate web.HEAVEN BURNS by Jen McGregorHeaven Burns is a historical novella, dramatizing one of the most barbarous practices prevalent in Restoration Scotland.It is 1662 and Scotland suffers a scourge of witches. What else could explain the wars, the plagues, the storms?Runaway housewife Isobel has a duty to do, acting as clerk to John Dixon, the finest witchpricker in the country. She''s sure it''s what God wants her to do. She''s sure she can keep her growing feelings for Dixon in check.When a stranger appears telling wild tales of stolen names and false identities, Isobel''s loyalty is put to the test. Is the stranger telling her of a great wrong to be put right, or sent from Hell to thwart the witch hunts?JUST LIKE HIM TO DIE by Douglas BrutonJust Like Him To Die by Douglas Bruton tells of the last days of Dylan Thomas as he lies unconscious and dying far from his Welsh home in a hospital bed in New York''s Saint Vincent Hospital.Dylan Thomas was a womanizer, a drunk, a bad husband, parent and friend, but Just Like Him To Die makes an effort to redeem him.In this new novella from Douglas Bruton, Dylan Thomas remembers ― albeit imperfectly ― episodes from his life which he transmutes these into gentle Under-Milk-Wood-like stories which are full of fun and word-play pyrotechnics.Weaving in and out of the poet''s thoughts and recollections are the voices of those gathered around him at the end. At the poet''s death, everyone forgives Dylan Thomas his failings and remembers only the soft and the warm and the good things about him.Just Like Him To Die is subtitled ''a short novel for voices'' which mirrors the subtitle for Under Milk Wood: (a play for voices)

Just Like Him To Die by Douglas Bruton tells of the last days of Dylan Thomas as he lies unconscious and dying far from his Welsh home in a hospital bed in New York''s Saint Vincent Hospital.Dylan Thomas was a womanizer, a drunk, a bad husband, parent and friend, but Just Like Him To Die makes an effort to redeem him.In this new novella from Douglas Bruton, Dylan Thomas remembers ― albeit imperfectly ― episodes from his life which he transmutes these into gentle Under-Milk-Wood-like stories which are full of fun and word-play pyrotechnics.After all, when we each come to tell the stories of our own lives, we turn them into ''untruths'' in just the same way.Weaving in and out of the poet''s thoughts and recollections are the voices of those gathered around him at the end. At the poet''s death, everyone forgives Dylan Thomas his failings and remembers only the soft and the warm and the good things about him.Just Like Him To Die is subtitled ''a short novel for voices'' which mirrors the subtitle for Under Milk Wood: (a play for voices).*The novella can be as long or as short as a piece of string, and as such invites the writer to experiment with the form and encourages both an intense focus on the writing and a sustained sense of play. Think juggling and the writing of a novella is like that moment when all the balls are in the air at once, all in play at the same time – at least for this writer it is. In Just Like Him To Die, (which is, incidentally and by design, the same length as Dylan Thomas'' ''play for voices'', Under Milk Wood) I hope I have captured the ebullient character of the raconteur with the fictionalisation and fabrication of his life for the entertainment of others. Try reading this novella with the lilting Welsh voice of the great poet, all coffee-grounds and cigarette smoke, in duelling opposition to the New York drag and drawl of Liz, Linnie, John Malcolm Brinnin and the Doctors.Douglas Bruton

'A work of seriousness, empathy and beauty' —The Scotsman'The thought in my head does not yet have shape or form, only direction, one picture leading into another.'An ageing artist, faced with his own mortality, embarks on one final artwork. As he battles to complete the project, working with an enigmatic young photographer, he finds his past and present blurring. Through the act of creation and the memories it excavates, the artist comes to a realisation about what matters most, and what he will leave behind when he is gone.This hybrid and innovative short novel responds through fiction to 'The New World', the final artwork by the late artist Alan Smith - which is in turn a response to an eighteenth-century fresco, Giandomenico Tiepolo's 'Il Mondo Nuovo'.With sparkling, dreamlike prose, Bruton weaves a story around these artworks, arriving at both a profound exploration of the creative process and a timeless love story told in a new way.

'You will live beyond one lifetime and beyond even two in the painting he makes of you.'In the Rijksmuseum of Amsterdam, there is a painting called Woman in Blue Reading a Letter. Each day a man visits to gaze at it. He is irresistibly drawn to it. Obsessed by it. He studies the painting, in search of resolutions to his past and present loves, and the Woman in Blue studies him back. For there is more to the Woman in Blue than any of the men who gaze upon her realise. She has a story of her own to tell.With a delicate balance of truth and fiction, past and present, Bruton masterfully explores the intersection between art, artist and viewer, arriving at a profound meditation on love and creation.

Wexford County, 1891. The unlikely discovery of a beached blue whale sets in motion a series of events leading to the present-day re-installation of a fundamental piece of London's Natural History Museum. Amherst, Massachusetts, circa. 1850. A letter is found revealing an intimate secret about the reclusive Miss Emily and her brother's fiance Susan Huntington. London, circa. 1880. A young working-class woman named Ada Alice Pullen meets the esteemed painter Frederic Leighton, beginning a relationship that will transform her and the world of art forever.Three objects of hope, their stories retold as you've never heard them before: in the voices of the coxswain's girlfriend, the maid, and the model.