Elizabeth Regina churns out a never ending stream of romantic novels, with cardboard cutout characters and cliched plots, which sell in their millions.
She lives alone, except for the servants, rich as sin yet parsimonious to the core. But now, fifty-one, single, a teetotaller and still a virgin, Elizabeth has a dream. She years to be taken seriously by the literary establishment who dismiss her works a empty froth. Spurred on by the provocative barbed missiles hurled by her old friend and critic Kenneth Jenkins over the bread and butter pudding at Harvey Nichols, Elizabeth resolves to put an end to her safe, cosy, predictable lifestyle.
But who could have predicted that literary success and passionate romance would enter her life for the first time courtesy of a gay crippled dwarf, half moroccan, half Yorkshireman, with a name even Elizabeth couldn't have invented in one of her novels: Kirk Kurabbi?
In the most original love story of the century, featuring two vulnerable and unconventional characters who find each other against all odds, Jonathan King lifts the lid off the hypocrisy of London's literal establishment in this delicious, entertaining and poignant novel that builds to a startling - and highly controversial - conclusion