Sophomore novelist Wesley Stace (aka veteran singer-songwriter John Wesley Harding), describes the difference between writing novels and writing songs this way: “At the end of a day’s work on a novel, you have pushed a boulder an infinitesimal amount up a hill, and it might have rolled back down past where you started. But with a song, you’ve not only probably finished it, but you can play it at a gig that night and have people go, 'Hey, great song!’ ”

Sitting outside a sushi joint in his gorgeous Brooklyn, N.Y., neighborhood of Fort Greene, the East Sussex, England—born artist is as charming as Hugh Grant used to be and as energetic as his summer itinerary suggests: in a few days Stace is leaving for a lit conference in Brittany, France; from there he’s in Italy for a month, researching his third novel; then he’s flying to Japan for Hayakawa Publishing’s release of his first novel, Misfortune, and a series of music gigs; after that, his second novel drops in the U.S. and the U.K., launching a whole new round of publicity. And that’s all while putting the finishing touches on his 10th full-length album.

Though he kicked off his music career by ditching his political science Ph.D. program (he got his B.A. in English literature) to tour with the then-unknown Hothouse Flowers, critics never let Stace forget his Cambridge education: “My lyrics were often criticized for being kind of over literary,” he says. “Clever, in rock music, is such an insult. At some point I thought, 'Fuck this, I’ll write a book.’ ”

Six years of writing in self-imposed isolation—even his closest friends didn’t know he was writing a book—produced Misfortune (Little, Brown, 2005), a 19th-century family melodrama about an abandoned baby boy who’s found by the richest man in England and raised as a girl. Stace’s pal Rick Moody put it mildly when he said, “This isn’t quite where literature’s at nowadays.”

Stace initially held little hope for getting it published, and was shocked to find his manuscript the subject of a bidding war. “I got an agent [Jennifer Rudolph Walsh at William Morris] and the deal for Misfortune within two weeks,” says Stace. “I thought it was going to take two years.”

Characterized by the Washington Post as “some inspired collaboration between Charles Dickens and Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar,” Misfortune made a decent splash in America and the U.K., then hit bestseller lists in France. Better than that, it netted Stace a two-book deal from Little, Brown and “reestablished music as my main form of pleasure,” as opposed to his main source of income.

Stace’s two careers have dovetailed nicely, and not just in crossover sales: it was Stace’s 1997 song “Miss Fortune” that provided the plot for Misfortune, which in turn provided material for an a capella folk album (Songs of Misfortune), for which Stace formed a new band called the Love Hall Tryst.

Stace’s second novel, By George, due out in August, is a novel in the same vein as Misfortune, a multi-generational family melodrama told with a kind of genteel Victorian restraint, even though much of the book follows the 1970s boyhood of George Fisher, spent among three generations of female performers and an imposing boarding school. George’s story switches off with the memoirs of his namesake, a ventriloquist’s dummy who narrates his own adventures on the arm of George’s grandfather, Joe “Death Wish” Fisher. As the stories come together, Stace maintains a disarming tension between magic and realism that pays off beautifully.

Stace’s family provided some general inspiration for the Fisher clan—his mother is a singer, his sisters are stage performers, his father plays the piano—but George the dummy comes straight from life. It really is named George, it really did belong to Stace’s grandfather and it’s currently sitting on Stace’s desk. The book’s jacket features a portrait of the real George, and Stace is planning on bringing George with him to readings. “He can sit on the podium next to me, and I’ll read from his diaries,” says Stace. And then, as if realizing for the first time, “It’ll be like ventriloquism! Except my lips will be moving.”