Tag: Douglas Bruton

My Favourite Fiction in 2025

As I turned the last page of one of the very first books I read this year, I knew it would make my 2025 Top Ten. It may even be my Top Read. It’s Lucy Steeds‘s The Artist, set in rural Provence in the years after WWI. Rupert is sent off to France to write about the reclusive and wildly successful artist, once a friend of the deceased Cezanne, Edouard Tartuffe. Here he meets the idiosyncratic and uncommunicative painter, and his timid, almost invisible niece, Ettie, who serves his every need. This is their story – evocative, involving and completely immersive.

Shortly after this, I read Tessa Hadley‘s The Party. Hadley packs a lot into this novella about two student sisters, Evelyn and Moira, living in Bristol on the cusp of the 1950s. We meet them at a party in an all-but abandoned pub. We’re introduced to their home life, and to their sortie out of this stifling environment. A thoughtful and enjoyable evocation of a period of recent history and its awareness of class, its sexual and societal mores that feels at once so distant, yet so very recognisable.

Douglas Bruton‘s Woman in Blue next. He must have been fascinated by Vermeer’s Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, in the Rijksmuseum: he knows it so well. In his story, an unnamed man visits this picture every day, for several hours, knows it intimately and interrogates it for meaning. The other narrator is the young woman in the picture, who describes how it is she comes to sit for this particular portrait, and her own feelings. This book explores the boundaries between reality and illusion in art, inspecting the portrait and the two protagonists intimately. It’s a captivating novella, with a surprise ending, and beautifully expressed throughout.

Joseph O’Connor‘s The Ghosts of Rome now. A thriller that starts where My Father’s House leaves off: though it can be read independently of the earlier book without difficulty. We’re in Nazi-occupied Rome in 1944. The novel details the activities of a group in the Vatican known as The Choir, daring Escape-Line activists, who have real achievements under their belts despite the disapproval of the Pope, and the efforts of Obersturmbannführer Paul Hauptmann to have them brought down. The writing is immediate, graphic and authentic; and the book is based on a real knowledge and understanding of this particular slice of Rome’s wartime history. It’s a thrilling and involving story that I was captivated by from the very first page.

Georgina Harding‘s Land of the Living has two settings: the Burma campaign towards the end of WWII, set in the beautifully exotic and remote landscape of Nagaland with its rains, forests, waterfalls and exotic birds; and the muted grey, flat Norfolk farmland to which Lt. Charles Ashe returns to farm following his wartime soldiering. Ashe soon marries the woman he was engaged to, Claire, and embarks on the hard day to day life of a Norfolk famer. He can’t – won’t – communicate with her about the horrors he’s encountered. She doesn’t know how to break his protective shell, finds she hardly knows him. Their mutual incomprehension, and Ashe’s two vastly different worlds is well-wrought. A vivid and emotionally charged book.

The Safekeep: Yael van der Wouden. We’re in a small Dutch town in the 1960s. WWII has cast a long shadow. Memories of the hardships endured then, and of the fall-out from the defeat of Germany intercede in every day life.This book keeps on delivering surprises. Is it about a lonely – and frankly unpleasant – young woman, Isabel, left living in the family home after her parents had died and her brothers departed? Is it about an astonishingly unexpected lesbian love affair? Or perhaps something else altogether? An absorbing, cleverly plotted book, which made me aware of a part of Dutch history about which I knew little.

We Germans, by Alexander Starritt, takes the form of a long account written by an elderly German, shortly before his death, to his British grandson, who has, perhaps clumsily, been asking what the old man did back in WWII. In 1944, Meissner, a German artillery soldier, had been fighting with his unit in Russia, in Ukraine. But in Poland, he and a few others somehow got separated when detailed to look for a rumoured food depot. They’re forced to kill as they attempt to muddle their way back to their unit, They witness horror. They steal. They squabble. This is a well-drawn book, a deft exploration of the moral contradictions inherent in saving one’s own life at the cost of the lives of others. Though fiction, it’s clearly deeply rooted in the reality of the helpless, pointless horror of the last period of the war for those often starving people, both army and hapless civilians who found themselves marooned on the Eastern Front.

With Benjamin Wood‘s Seascraper, we’re in the 1950s. Thomas is nineteen, and lives in poverty with his mum in a dishevelled house in a depressed Lancashire coastal town , scrabbling a living since his much-loved grandfather’s death by continuing his work as a shankar – prawn collector – using a pony and trap. Though bright, he never completed his schooling. His dream is to become a musician. One day, an American film director who somehow meets his mum involves Thomas in his idea to use a stretch of local beach as the atmospheric backdrop to his latest film. And he’s willing to pay Thomas well. Although he’s sceptical, this is an opportunity perhaps to escape his obligations, the bleak poverty of his situation. Of course, things don’t turn out to be so straightforward, but yet the story ends with a glimmer of hope. This story, unfolding a film-that-might-be is cinematic in its evocation of the bleak seaside landscape and Thomas’ dreary, tough existence. It packs a lot into its 160 pages. Benjamin Wood is someone whose writing is to be savoured.

The Two Roberts by Damian Barr re-imagines two lives: those of Bobby McBride and Robert Colquhoun, two twentieth century painters of whom you may not have heard. Both born in working-class Glasgow just before WWI, they both had a struggle at home to be permitted to attend Glasgow School of Art. Where they met, and soon became inseparable, living and working together, exploring their homosexuality at a time when they risked ostracism and imprisonment by being so much as noticed for this. Early success propelled them to star-status. They worked hard, but played harder, and their tendency to self-destruct sent them on a downward trajectory towards poverty and early death. An immersive, sympathetic imagining of two lives. The first part, where the two men overcome their difficult circumstances to become rising stars is perforce much more enjoyable than the later chapters illustrating their self-destruction. But the book describes well the blossoming of two talents, as well as showing what it meant to be queer in a society which both reviled and punished homosexuality.

The Wax Child by Olga Ravn is beautifully translated by Martin Aitken. This story takes us to 17th century Denmark, where on average, one ‘witch’ was burned every five days. This kind of event was mirrored all over Europe. Our narrator is a little beeswax doll fashioned by a impoverished noblewoman, Christenze Krukow. Omniscient, she sees and hears all that goes on. How her maker is one of a group of women who work, and sing, and gossip, and practice the folk remedies they learned from their own mothers: who protect one another from violence from husbands or others in their household: who become seen in their communities as practisers of magic and witchcraft. The book is interspersed with spells and incantations which exist not to harm, but to protect; to prevent accident and disease; to bid others be kind; to divine if someone’s life may soon end. Inevitably, most die, found guilty of witchcraft. This book is beautiful, horrifying, visceral, poetic. There is a sense of spells being woven on every page. The women in this story existed. They died as ‘witches’ and now they are remembered in this powerfully atmospheric and evocative re-imagining of their circumstances.

I made this list of Top Ten books a week or so ago. But lo! Since then I have had two further 5 ⭐reads. I’ll review those in my Love your Library round-up next week. They couldn’t be more different from each other. They’re Saltblood: Francesca de Tores and Back in the Day: Oliver Lovrenski (Translated by Nichola Smalley).

It’s been a good year for memorable books. Of the 112 or so books I’ve read, well over half have scored 4⭐and above.

Only one has gained but a single star: Horrible Histories author Terry Deary came and spoke at our local Independent book shop about his venture into crime writing – Actually I’m a Murderer. I thought I should give this book a chance, even though Cosy Crime isn’t my thing. I tried. I have concluded that Cosy Crime definitely isn’t my thing.

I already have a pile of books, mainly from the library – fiction, works in translation, and non-fiction, awaiting my attention in 2026. Not to mention the books that sit on our bookshelves, month after month, wondering why I never get round to them. One day …

The featured photo is by Nitin Arya, via Pexels.

Six Degrees of Separation: From All Fours to Grow Where They Fall

On the first Saturday of every month, a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.

Kate: : Books are my Favourite and Best

All Fours,by Miranda July and this month’s starter book, is narrated by a 46 year old woman, a wife, a mother, a bisexual, a mixed media artist. I haven’t read it yet, but I think it’s on my TBR list.

Well, I picked up on the word ‘artist’.  Not a woman, not a family man, but a 16th century Florentine painter, probably homosexual: Jacopo Pontormo.  He’s the sort-of-star of Laurent Binet’s Perspectives. This story relies on a clever conceit: that the author (who unlike the very much alive actual author) finds, towards the end of the 19th century an interesting packet of letters in a curio shop. His interest piqued, he buys, then translates them. And presents them to us here, in this book. We’re in 16th century Florence. The cast list can be found in any history book dealing with that period of political and art history. Cosimo de’ Medici; Catherine de’ Medici; Giorgio Vasari; Michelangelo; Bronzino; Cellini; Pontormo: the list goes on, but this story is entirely untrue. It revolves around the fact that Pontormo, painting a now-lost group of frescoes, is discovered dead at his work. Suicide? Or murder? And if the latter, who’s the murderer? A series of letters between groups of the characters involved, not all of whom know or have dealings with one another, picks over the evidence, relying on actual investigation – sometimes – but more often hunches, gossip and personal ‘intuition’. There are subplots: There’s for instance, Maria de’ Medici, Cosimo’s 17 year old daughter, who’s to be married against her will for reasons of political alliance. When guards search Pontormo’s quarters, they find an obscene painting of Venus and Cupid—with the face of Venus replaced by that of Maria. What a scandal!  This is a cleverly accomplished story, and wonderfully translated. It’s a tight, fast paced whodunnit brimming with subplots, from an author who clearly knows his stuff about the history of the period.

Let’s pass to another artist, Vermeer, in Douglas Bruton’s Woman in Blue. Douglas Bruton must have been fascinated by Vermeer’s Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, in the Rijksmuseum: he knows it so well. He gives this interest – or in this case near-obsession – to one of the two narrators of this book who take alternate chapters throughout. An unnamed man visits this picture every day, for several hours, knows it intimately, interrogates it for meaning. This does not go unnoticed by gallery staff, or by his wife, who does not know where it is her husband disappears to. The other narrator is the young woman in the picture, who describes how it is she comes to sit for this particular portrait, and her own feelings. She is sensitive to the thoughts and feelings of the man who is transfixed by her portrait, amused that he is as in thrall to her as Vermeer himself, though she’s unaware of this man’s musings on previous romantic entanglements and indeed his feelings about his wife.This book explores the boundaries between reality and illusion in art, inspecting the portrait and the two protagonists intimately. It’s a captivating novella, with a surprise ending, and beautifully expressed throughout.

All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley is a book I have only just started.  Bringley was for a period of his life a museum attendant  Here’s what Google Books has to say about his work: ‘A moving, revelatory portrait of one of the world’s great museums and its treasures by a writer who spent a decade as a museum guard. Millions of people climb the grand marble staircase to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art every year. But only a select few have unrestricted access to every nook and cranny….’

Museum Attendant?  It’s not such a big leap from there to librarian perhaps. The Librarianist by Patrick de Witt.  At first I was prepared to be charmed by this whimsical account of the life and times of Bob Comet. A misfit at school, he became a librarian – of course he did. Then he continued – quite contentedly – his largely friendless existence, living in the house where he’d been born, now his alone since his mother’s death. He meets a young woman – also a social misfit, completely under her father’s thumb – at the library. Reader, he marries her. At about this time, he also comes across the man who becomes his only male friend, and – no, spoiler alert. We are introduced to Bob at the point when he’s long been separated from his wife. And, so far so good. But we plunge back into his younger life and the book loses its way, especially when we spend far too long in the time when he ran away from home as an eleven year old. It’s not hugely relevant to the story or to the man he became. A bit of a curate’s egg of a book then. Good in parts. But I’m not encouraged to read more work by de Witt. 

Another book about a misfit.  Jenny Mustard’s What a Time to be Alive. Perhaps I’m too old. This book comes with glowing endorsements on the cover from a number of well-regarded authors. But I just can’t share their enthusiasm. Sickan, a 21 year old student at Stockholm University, comes from a small town where she was often lonely, and seemed a bit odd. She’s determined to reinvent herself but is socially awkward. She seems to make progress: finding a flatmate, beginning to join in normal student life, albeit always feeling something of an imposter. She even finds a boyfriend, who’s charming. It’s a story about loneliness, and the well-remembered awkwardness of becoming an adult and wondering which bits of your true self you wish to hang on to. But although it’s well written, I never really engaged with it. My loss, probably.

My last book is about a man who isn’t a misfit, because he tries so very hard not to be, in Michael Donkor’s Grow Where They Fall. Here is the story of Kwarme, son of Ghanaian immigrants and living in London. The book is told in alternating chapters: his 10 year old self who attends a multicultural primary school, and his 30 year old self, who teaches in a multicultural high school. Black and queer, Kwame is also a Durham graduate. His flat mate, an upper class white man writing about wine, is very different from his traditionally-minded working class Ghanaian family. Kwame fits in, though never without a conscious struggle. It’s what he always has to do. Conforming is something he’s used to, though his homosexuality is a real challenge to someone of his cultural background. He’s a popular teacher, well liked, but his uncertainties and feelings of being unmoored and a little out of his depth persist. Towards the end of the book, one event, small in itself, assumes huge proportions in his mind and forces him to finally make some big decisions. This is a novel about Kwame finding his place. Finding himself, in fact, and having the courage to live his life. It’s told in the context – often amusingly recounted – of a small boy’s day-to-day struggle to please, and an adult’s wish also to be liked and respected.

I seem to have done quite a bit of travelling this month’s choices (and in real life, as it happens). Next month, Kate starts with the 2025 Stella Prize winner, Michelle de Kretser’s work of autofiction, Theory & Practice. Where will that lead us all, I wonder?

Image Credits

Jacopo Pontormo:  Visitation of Carmagnano, Church of San Francesco e Michele (Wikimedia Commons)

Delft: Who's Denilo? (Unsplash)

Metropolitan Museum of Art: Yilei (Jerry) Bao (Unsplash)

Library image (Actually Barter Books in Alnwick): my own image.

Snow scene: my own image.

Ghanaian man: Kojo Kwarteng (Unsplash)