The Bruegel Boy

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 save
him 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.

Author Biography

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
Romantic Novelists’ 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 famous ancestor’s
family. She currently teaches for Oxford University and Goldsmiths, mentors
writers, and is the author of Get Started in Writing Historical Fiction
and her well-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.