With or Without Angels by Douglas Bruton – #ABookADayInMay – Day 5

You probably know about Douglas Bruton by now. Even if you’ve missed that I love Blue Postcards and Hope Never Knew Horizon, there are many other book bloggers who also love him – and, indeed, Madame Bibi has already reviewed one of his books in her own Novella A Day In May project. I’m continuing my Bruton journey with With Or Without Angels (2023). Like the other works I’ve read by him, it responds to and is inspired by specific artworks. In this case, The New World by Alan Smith – which, in turn, is a response to Giandomenico Tiepolo’s Il Mondo Nuovo (‘The New World’). I have to confess that I had never heard of either artist or their work, but (miraculous for a paperback!) they are printed in the book itself – so I didn’t need to have a Google tab open. Smith’s The New World is a series of 11 photograph collages, starting with a selfie of Smith and his wife in the Tate Modern. They appear in the subsequent images, but so do elements of Tiepolo’s work, other landscapes, and a…