In the late nineteenth century, in Washington Square, two children play with a red balloon… and so begins the strange romance between Daniel, beautiful and tiny, and Grace, known as The Fat Princess, an orphaned girl whose enormous girth matches her wealth. Each wishes for a life of the mind, for artistic mastery, to be read and to be understood — most of all by each other — but through their lives, the couple only occasionally meet, until Daniel uncovers Grace’s great secret in her House of Death.

James Friel was born in the northwest of England to Irish parents from Donegal, his mother a native Gaelic speaker. In addition to four previous novels, he has adapted works of fiction for radio, including Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and A Pale View of Hills, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, and Orhan Pamuk’s Snow. He is Programme Leader for the M.A. and Ph.D. in Writing at Liverpool’s John Moores University, and he is Visiting Writer at L. Universite de Rouen, France.