Cultural History Retold: Douglas Bruton in conversation with Victoria MacKenzie

Tickets £5-12.99

This is a live, in-person event.

Location: Christ Church Centre, 6a Morningside Road, EH10 4DD

Join Douglas Bruton, author of Hope Never Knew Horizon, and Victoria MacKenzie, author of For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain, as they discuss their work and the process of retelling our cultural history in a way you've never heard it before.

About the Books

Hope Never Knew Horizon by Douglas Bruton

'Completely engrossing' - James Robertson 

'Opened me up to unknown worlds and left me wanting more' - Devika Ponnambalam

A gem of a book' - Linda Cracknell

Three objects of hope, their stories retold as you've never heard them before: in the voices of the coxswain's girlfriend, the maid, and the model.  

Wexford County, 1891. The unlikely discovery of a beached blue whale sets in motion a series of events leading to the present-day re-installation of a fundamental piece of London's Natural History Museum.

Amherst, Massachusetts, circa. 1850. A letter is found revealing an intimate secret about the reclusive Miss Emily and her brother's fiance Susan Huntington.

London, circa. 1880. A young working-class woman named Ada Alice Pullen meets the esteemed painter Frederic Leighton, beginning a relationship that will transform her and the world of art forever.

For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain by Victoria Mackenzie

In the year of 1413, two women meet for the first time in the city of Norwich.

Margery has left her fourteen children and husband behind to make her journey. Her visions of Christ – which have long alienated her from her family and neighbours, and incurred her husband’s abuse – have placed her in danger with the men of the Church, who have begun to hound her as a heretic.

Julian, an anchoress, has not left Norwich, nor the cell to which she has been confined, for twenty-­three years. She has told no one of her own visions – and knows that time is running out for her to do so.

The two women have stories to tell one another. Stories about girlhood, motherhood, sickness, loss, doubt and belief; revelations more powerful than the world is ready to hear. Their meeting will change everything.

Sensual, vivid and humane, For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain cracks history open to reveal the lives of two extraordinary women.

About the Authors

Douglas Bruton is the author of Blue Postcards, longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2022, as well as The Chess Piece Magician (Floris Books); Mrs Winchester’s Gun Club (Scotland Street Press); and With or  Without Angels, published by Fairlight Books in 2023, currently in  production for a film adaptation.

Victoria Mackenzie is a fiction writer and poet. She is the winner of the Scottish Book Trust New Writer Award and the inaugural Emerging Writer Award from Moniack Mhor. She was shortlisted for the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize, as well as being awarded prestigious writing residencies in Scotland, Finland and Australia. She teaches creative writing for the Open College of the Arts.