In the summer of 1566 an inferno of political rebellion and image-smashing, the Beeldenstorm, swept across Flanders and Holland; young Gillis Vervloet, model and muse to artist Pieter Bruegel, almost didn’t survive.
More than sixty years later, in the Saarland forest, Gil wants only to enter the monastery of St Bartolomëus and live out his days in peace, but first he must find their long-lost statue of St Michael. And to prove he is not a heretic, Gil must also account for his life with Bruegel, who painted a tense path through the artistic riches, intellectual ferment and explosive religious politics of the Low Countries. As he writes of his passionate vocation for the priesthood and impossible love for Dorothea, his outlaw brother Roeland and radical priest-mentor Pater Paulus, Gil’s hard-won understanding must show him where to seek St Michael, and how to save himself from the Inquisition.
The Bruegel Boy is a profound exploration of love, brotherhood, vocation and the power of art to transform lives but also divide and even destroy them.
Emma Darwin’s debut novel, The Mathematics of Love, is probably the only book ever to be nominated for both the Commonwealth Writers Best First Book and the RomanticNovelists’ Association Book of the Year, among other prizes. Her second novel, A Secret Alchemy, was a Sunday Times bestseller; her most recent book, This is Not a Book About Charles Darwin, is a memoir of disastrously failing to write fiction about her famousancestor’s family. She currently teaches for Oxford University and Goldsmiths, mentors writers, and is the author of Get Started in Writing Historical Fiction and herwell-known blog, This Itch of Writing. She grew up in London – with interludes in Manhattan and Brussels, where her lifelong love of Pieter Bruegel the Elder was born – and still lives there.
