Dave J. Brown

A Novel · 2026

"You've been standing in the field your whole life. You just couldn't see it yet."

Field of Purple Bonnets — A novel by Dave J. Brown

A literary speculative love story about sight, technology, and the cost of being watched instead of seen.

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Field of Purple Bonnets cover — a woman in a purple dress in a moonlit field of bluebonnets

If you've spent any time in Texas in spring, you know how blue the bluebonnets can be. Whole hillsides, whole highways lined with them — blue enough to make you pull the car over.

Now imagine someone handed you a pair of glasses that let you see what you'd been missing — every ultraviolet signal the flower had been wearing the whole time. The field you thought was blue is actually purple. It always was. You just didn't have the eyes for it.

Field of Purple Bonnets is a novel about what happens when a man builds those glasses… and what it costs when the world decides who should be allowed to see.

The Story

Zin has spent her life reading people… it's how she survived a childhood with no anchor, and it's how she built a career assembling teams that fix what looks unfixable. She knows how to walk into any room and find the truth in it. What she's stopped trusting is her own heart, which keeps choosing the wrong people, pouring too much into men who don't know how to hold it.

So this time she lets her best friend choose. He scrolls through her dating app and points at a lonely project manager who still looks like he believes things can work out. She figures she'll give it one date.

That date ends in a field of Texas bluebonnets, a tab of acid, and a vision neither of them can explain… ultraviolet patterns pulsing through the flowers, through her skin, through everything. The field they thought was blue is actually purple. It always was. They just didn't have the eyes for it.

What begins there becomes the great bet of her life. Zin sees something in Richard he can't see in himself, and she puts everything… her savings, her network, her faith… behind it. Together they start building technology that lets human beings see the invisible world for the first time.

But a tool that lets everyone see more is also a tool that lets the powerful watch more closely. And the closer they get to changing how the world sees, the more someone wants to control who gets to see… and who gets seen.

Field of Purple Bonnets is a love story, a tech thriller, and a warning about perception, power, and what it costs to give your whole self to someone who's still learning to see.

238 pages. Hardcover, paperback, and eBook.

Get Your Copy

Where to buy

Buy on Amazon — Hardcover $34.99
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Available in hardcover ($34.99), paperback ($24.99), and eBook ($6.99) wherever books are sold.

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The First 100 Readers Program

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Who Should Read This

If you've ever wanted to see more.

For readers of literary love stories

Not romance… literature. A love story between two people who find each other through a dating app and build a world together, then watch it crack under the weight of ambition and compromise. If you've read An American Marriage, The Great Believers, or On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, you'll recognize the stakes.

For readers of speculative technology fiction

BeeVision isn't science fiction… it's science-adjacent. Augmented reality glasses that translate ultraviolet light, thermal data, and electromagnetic fields into visible overlays. The technology feels eighteen months away, not eighteen centuries. If you've read The Circle, Klara and the Sun, or Severance, this lives in that register.

For people thinking about AI, surveillance, and who controls perception

A novel about what happens when a tool built to expand consciousness gets absorbed by the surveillance state. Crowd monitoring. Emotional pattern detection. 'Public safety' contracts that erode civil liberties. If you're watching the AI debate unfold in real time, this book is fiction that's already thinking three moves ahead.

For readers looking for Black protagonists with depth

Richard is ambitious, romantic, technical, afraid, brilliant, flawed, and fully interior. A man who writes poetry at 2 AM about intimacy he's never experienced, who plays RPGs alone on Friday nights, who falls so hard for a woman that he rebuilds his entire life around her belief in him. Not written to explain Blackness to anyone. Written to live inside it… including the part where the world punishes you for being visible.

"A love story about what it costs to see more than everyone else… and what it costs when the people in power notice."

— from the author

Book Clubs & Reading Groups

Written to be discussed.

Field of Purple Bonnets was written to be discussed. Love, technology, surveillance, consciousness, psychedelics, race, ambition, compromise, chosen family… every chapter opens a door that a room full of readers can walk through together.

This book sits at the intersection of literary fiction and speculative tech, which means your book club can argue about love and power dynamics one week and debate the ethics of augmented perception the next.

If your book club, reading group, library, ERG, or classroom is interested:

  • 10+ copies: I'll join your discussion virtually.
  • 20+ copies: Signed bookplates for every reader, plus a live conversation.
  • Local groups (NC Triad): I'll come to you in person.
Invite Dave to Your Book Club
Dave J. Brown reading in a bookstore

About the Author

Dave J. Brown

Dave J. Brown writes fiction about love, technology, consciousness, and the strange systems people build to survive themselves. Field of Purple Bonnets is his most ambitious work to date.

He pays his bills helping organizations navigate enterprise technology rollouts, building small applications, and consulting on the kinds of complex implementations that make most people's eyes glaze over. The technical fluency shows up in his writing… not as exposition, but as texture. When Richard designs BeeVision, the engineering feels real because it comes from someone who thinks in systems.

He lives just south of Austin, not far from a field of bluebonnets that looks exactly the way you'd imagine.

author.davejbrown.com →Substack: The Field →

Also by Dave J. Brown

Dave has published other fiction and has several projects in progress. This is the one he wants you to read first.

Stay in the field.

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