Douglas Bruton is a relatively recent discovery for me, thanks to the blogosphere. It was only last year that I read With or Without Angels, Hope Never Knew Horizon, and Blue Postcards. His writing weaves real lives with fiction and is strongly concerned with art, human relationships, and the quality of silence that exists in these. He is sparsely poetic, unpretentious and experimental without being alienating. I knew I would start NADIM this year with his 2025 novella, Woman in Blue published by Fairlight Books.

The novella takes its title from the seventeenth century portrait by Vermeer of the same name, sometimes also called Woman Reading a Letter, housed at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The unnamed male narrator is a writer living in the city with his wife. He visits the museum daily to gaze at the painting.

“There is almost no sound in the gallery, for I am the first. Then it is just the Woman in Blue and me, and I come upon her as though I have turned a corner in a house and seen her through an open door.”

He becomes obsessed with the painting, and yet somehow it isn’t pitiful or creepy. He is trying to understand, and the enigma of the painting means he is always fully aware of the limits of his understanding.

“Things belong in their own time and space and taking them out of that time changes everything.”

His chapters are interspersed with the chapters of Angelieke, the model for the painting. As she describes the process of being painted by Vermeer, she also exists metaphysically, able to comment on all the people who come to visit her portrait, including the other narrator.

If this sounds overly whimsical, it really isn’t. I think this is due to Bruton giving Angelieke the most grounded, earthy voice in the novel. She is from a poor family, she needs money. She sees Vermeer and knows how to attract him. She holds the most agency and the most knowledge. This means that while she is necessarily objectified by Vermeer in the act of painting, and by the narrator in the act of viewing, she is never diminished.

Bruton carefully balances plot driven aspects around the male narrator and his wife, and Angelieke and her family, with wider considerations about viewpoint, acts of art, acts of love.

I think ‘tender’ is always the word I arrive at when writing about Bruton, and Woman in Blue is no exception. But I think I could also mention his elegance and beauty. Both these qualities can be distancing, but in his writing they never are. He closely examines lives and evokes them with such care and compassion that we are always placed alongside.

“Watching the woman in blue reading her letter it is as though I stop existing and I’m just the pared-back pure act of looking.”