Magic!

The June 18 issue of Publishers Weekly features a profile of novelist Wesley Stace, better known as veteran singer-songwriter John Wesley Harding.

Stace spent six years writing in self-imposed isolation to produce Misfortune, a 19th-century family melodrama about an abandoned baby boy who is found by the richest man in England and raised as a girl. Although he initially held little hope for getting it published, it became the subject of a bidding war that netted him a two-book deal from Little, Brown. Stace's second novel, By George, due out in August, is a multigenerational family melodrama that follows both the 1970s boyhood of George Fisher and the story of his namesake, a ventriloquist's dummy who narrates his own adventures on the arm of George's grandfather.