Flesh & Bronze audio cover
Cover image @ Subbotina Anna, Fotolia


Flesh & Bronze e-book cover


"Juliette" wiping her left hip

Flesh & Bronze

Flesh & Bronze was published in October 2011, read as an audio-book by Julia Franklin. An e-book version will be available in December.

To purchase the audio version, go to www.audible.co.uk.

For the e-book version, see www.amazon.co.uk.

One old whore…
One proud man…
One artist to bind them.

When the painter Edgar Degas died in 1917, a surprise broke upon the art world. Discovered in his Paris studio were nearly 150 sculptures: women posing, girls dancing, horses prancing, women bathing – his usual subjects, but in three dimensions rather than two. During his lifetime Degas had only exhibited one sculpture, the celebrated Little Dancer Aged Fourteen Years, and even she remained in wax, uncast in bronze at his death. Of the newly discovered pieces – created from wax or clay, stuffed with cork mats, pipe cleaners, wood-shavings and other bits of rubbish – half fell apart on handling. Degas himself seems not to have intended his sculpture to be cast in bronze and exhibited. Yet, in a decision that is controversial to this day, his agent and heirs decided to commission Paris’s foremost bronze-founder to undertake the task of casting the surviving 73. Degas’s artistic legacy was to be doubled without his consent.

The sculpture at the centre of Flesh and Bronze is the Seated Woman Wiping Her Left Hip. I have brought to fictional life two people intimately connected with it: the woman who modelled for it, Juliette Ranvier, an uneducated, rumbustious woman with nothing to sell but her body, and the man who worked on the fragile structures and cast them in bronze, Didier Chenal, artistically and technically gifted but now a servant of artists, and embittered by his failure.

After a prologue set at the height of the Impressionist furore in 1881, the opening scene in 1920 brings these two characters head to head. Juliette, now ancient, homeless, lice-ridden and hungry, shuffles herself down from the slums to the bright lights of Paris’s boulevards in search of food and shelter. There, framed in the window of an elegant apartment, she sees a bronze sculpture of… herself. ‘Bugger it,’ she thinks, ‘that’s me! I have rights here!’ – and installs herself on the step. The apartment is Didier’s. Proud and embattled, sexually conflicted and needy, Didier has lost his only son to the battle of Verdun and his wife to the influenza epidemic. All he has left is his work, and nothing is going to disturb his concentration on that.

But Juliette has arrived to disturb his ease. His demure daughter-in-law (whose bedroom he has been invading), his small deaf grandson, even his friend and colleague Aristide – all conspire against him. All have secrets whose revelation will change his life, and Juliette’s. And in the wings lurks M’sieur Degas, the complex and contradictory genius haunting each of them, challenging the very meaning of their lives.

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Thirteen Months to Christmas

a feast of short stories by Alison Leonard

One story for Christmas, one for each month of the year and then another for next Christmas.

Find the ghost of your lover’s great-aunt in a wardrobe, or try to get to Scarborough and be prevented by a death. Curl up with Killer Ken in his winter garden, or with Catriona warning of disaster over the airwaves. Pick up a strange old woman from the airport, like Jasmine, and find that she’ll tell you the meaning of your life. Cower in terror of Ronald Reagan in rural Sudan, discover you’re pregnant by a man in a teepee, or feel responsible for the birth of a thalidomide child. Yearn for a cure for grief, like a young wet-nurse sitting beside a French river in the 1880s. Eat silent meals with a post-communist Russian, or drink strange liquor with picnickers under the trees outside Prague. Have fun in Florence, or wash your mother’s hair in the deep south and dream of murder.

This is a gift for the whole year. Buy it for someone you love, or for yourself, or both.

Available now from the publisher www.troubador.co.uk, or as a book from www.amazon.co.uk, or from Amazon as a Kindle e-book.

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The Imperfections of Love

This trilogy, or novel in three parts, is set in three decades – the 1980s, the 1990s and the 2000s. It is the story of three women, their passions and their politics.

The three parts are: Scarlet Poppies, Heavenly Lilies, and Wild Irises.

In Scarlet Poppies, Enid, a young Welshwoman, marches off from Llangollen with a group of women peace protesters in 1983 to the nuclear missile base at Greenham Common. But she’s in love with a policeman from the other side of the fence.

In Heavenly Lilies, Sheila, the English ex-wife of the policeman in Scarlet Poppies, is serving on the jury of a Fred-and-Rose-West-type trial in 1995 but flunks the final decision. She flees to a remote Irish island, where she has a conflicted but ultimately healing relationship with Colin, and returns to her duties as juror.

In Wild Irises we meet Fiona, a Scotswoman who has married Colin and now, in 2004, has twin sons. After a professional success far from home, she finds herself in a brief sexual encounter with a stranger, who turns out to be an officer on leave – for mysterious reasons – from service in Iraq.

Entwined with the three stories of these women come those of their men:
Lyndon, caught up in issues too big for him and the threat of women’s power;
Lew, the attractive young drug addict who can’t face love and fatherhood;
Colin, who struggles with his demons and wants to eat his cake and have it too;
Lewis, who sloughs off his status as Suicidal Loser and finds the courage to come back to life.

At the end of the trilogy, Enid and Sheila and Fiona come together to help each other face a complex tangle of life, love, and death.

What kind of fiction is this?

Women’s fiction, perhaps – though the discerning male reader may also be hooked. Literary fiction? Maybe, though not of the metropolitan kind. It’s not chick-lit or hen-lit, because it’s rooted in landscape and in political reality. Reagan, Thatcher, Fred and Rosemary West, George W Bush and Tony Blair stalk the pages of these intimately personal stories.

Nuclear threat, sexual violence, pornography and climate change are the shadows behind the lives of Enid, Sheila and Fiona, and of the men they love and grapple with. Personal redemption may be possible, but the world itself – their corner of the world, the world they dream of, or the planet itself – may not survive.

The key to their three personal stories lies in one question: can these women reconcile themselves to the imperfections of love?

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