Publisher's Synopsis
In the late nineteenth century, in Washington Square, two children play with a red balloon. And there begins this strangest of romances, a liaison between two authors, beautiful and tiny Daniel and the orphan Grace, The Fat Princess, as enormous as she is wealthy. Both wish for artistic mastery, to be read and to be understood, most of all by each other. And yet through their lives, these lovers only occasionally meet and touch, until Daniel uncovers Grace's great secret in her House of Death. In its daylight episodes, James Friel's new novel has the elegance of Henry James's and Edith Wharton's Belle Époque family dramas, but after dark, THE POSTHUMOUS AFFAIR is hallucinatory, nerve-bending - as grotesque and fantastic as the stories of Edgar Allen Poe and Mervyn Peake. Novelist Grace Dane Mazur says, "THE POSTHUMOUS AFFAIR, a devastating and illuminating exploration of love and grief, opens in late nineteenth-century New York and ends in an Italy that is mysterious, decaying, and gloomily beautiful. Friel has the brilliance of The Master, with none of James's obscurity. Instead, this is heavily sensual work-sometimes humorous and wild, sometimes contemplative, and very often wonderfully peculiar. All the way through, the novel is so lucid, and reveals such deep understanding of the emotions, that it presents to us an astonishing new form of erotic love."
