This wide-ranging handbook is aimed at students who want to develop their fiction writing skills. Reading and reflective practice are foregrounded, and students are given constant recommendations of what they might read. Imaginative and accessible, this companionable handbook is clearly and innovatively structured around the processes and techniques of developing writing. It will allow students to acquire a portfolio of key skills and is ideal for anyone writing short stories or longer fiction.

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...