Douglas Bruton – författare

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.

Inspired by the true-story of the Winchester Mystery House in California.Guilt mires Sarah Winchester. When her husband dies, she inherits the fortune of husband’s invention of the Winchester rifle. After, her own complicity in the deaths of those killed by the rifle, haunts her relentlessly. So, in an effort to ease her conscience, she begins the construction of the Winchester House, a maze of rooms meant to house the dead Sarah cannot seem to escape.

'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.

'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.