With or Without Angels

'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.

'Experimental yet accessible, serious but playful, provocative but moving. Douglas Bruton is a writer of boundless invention' –Stephen May, author of Sell Us The Rope

'a work of seriousness, empathy and beauty' –The Scotsman

'With lyrical and succinct prose, Douglas Bruton writes tenderly about the quest to capture memories and understand what makes a life. His writing really stays with me' –Julie Corbin, author of A Lie For A Lie

'A work of spare and brittle loveliness. With or Without Angels is a deeply moving depiction of art and the people who make it, at once visceral and restrained. I admired it enormously' –Nell Stevens, author of Briefly, A Delicious Life

'This book does not leave its readers unmoved. More compelling than a biography, Douglas Bruton's narrative once again immerses us in a life that shimmers through the delicate fabrics of art. The hero of the story is an artist who can no longer hold a brush. He uses a camera to take pictures that turn into collages. Each collage modifies hazy memories and takes us to a new colorful world full of mystery, longing, and invisible angels' –Julia Nemirovskaya the editor of Disbelief: 100 Anti-War Poems

Douglas Bruton has been published in various publications including Northwords Now, New Writing Scotland, Aestetica and The Irish Literary Review. His short stories have won competitions including Fish and The Neil Gunn Prize and he has had two novels published, The Chess Piece Magician and Mrs Winchester's Gun Club. His novella Blue Postcards was published by Fairlight Books in 2021, and was longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2022. His short novel With or Without Angels was published with Fairlight Books in 2023.

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