Novella Express #2

Edition #2 of Novella Express featuring: • The Hardest Winter by Carole Hamilton • Heaven Burns by Jen McGregor • Just Like Him To Die by Douglas Bruton Novella Express is a book series publishing novellas submitted from around the world. CONTRIBUTING TO EDITION #2: Carole Hamilton writes stories which often focus on individuals who live in the fringes of our society Jen McGregor is a playwright who specialises in using horror tropes to explore painful experiences, and will tell anyone who holds still long enough about her journey from gothic heroine to monster. Douglas Bruton has won many prizes for his short fiction. His children's novel, The Chess Piece Magician was published by Floris Books (2009); his literary fiction debut, Mrs Winchester's Gun Club, was published by Scotland Street Press (2019); and Blue Postcards, longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2022, was published by Fairlight Books (2021). THE NOVELLAS IN EDITION #2: THE HARDEST WINTER by Carole Hamilton The Hardest Winter by Carole Hamilton is a beautifully and realistically drawn novella, showing the hardships of farming life in Scotland today. Fiona and Drew live and work on a Scottish cattle farm. Beauty contrasts with the never ending chores and muck. Fiona is suffocated by the monotony of the endless tasks both in the farmhouse and outside. The continual preparation of meals, cleaning, feeding calves and helping with farm chores leaves her exhausted. Birth and death infiltrate her life till the harshest of winters with painful circumstances arrive. With this adversity there is always hope of a new future just as winter will always turn to spring. The ritual of the farming year, ploughing, planting and harvesting are linked to love, loss and new life. Fiona's life is caught in this exquisite and intricate web. HEAVEN BURNS by Jen McGregor Heaven Burns is a historical novella, dramatizing one of the most barbarous practices prevalent in Restoration Scotland. It is 1662 and Scotland suffers a scourge of witches. What else could explain the wars, the plagues, the storms? Runaway housewife Isobel has a duty to do, acting as clerk to John Dixon, the finest witchpricker in the country. She's sure it's what God wants her to do. She's sure she can keep her growing feelings for Dixon in check. When a stranger appears telling wild tales of stolen names and false identities, Isobel's loyalty is put to the test. Is the stranger telling her of a great wrong to be put right, or sent from Hell to thwart the witch hunts? JUST LIKE HIM TO DIE by Douglas Bruton Just Like Him To Die by Douglas Bruton tells of the last days of Dylan Thomas as he lies unconscious and dying far from his Welsh home in a hospital bed in New York's Saint Vincent Hospital. Dylan Thomas was a womanizer, a drunk, a bad husband, parent and friend, but Just Like Him To Die makes an effort to redeem him. In this new novella from Douglas Bruton, Dylan Thomas remembers - albeit imperfectly - episodes from his life which he transmutes these into gentle Under-Milk-Wood-like stories which are full of fun and word-play pyrotechnics. Weaving in and out of the poet's thoughts and recollections are the voices of those gathered around him at the end. At the poet's death, everyone forgives Dylan Thomas his failings and remembers only the soft and the warm and the good things about him. Just Like Him To Die is subtitled 'a short novel for voices' which mirrors the subtitle for Under Milk Wood: (a play for voices)