Daniel Wallace is best known for his debut novel “Big Fish,” which became a Hollywood movie. which became a Hollywood movie and is soon debuting as a musical. But he's written four more novels since then. His latest is called "The Kings and Queens of Roam," and it follows two sisters as they grow up in an imaginary former textile town.
The sisters are opposites. Helen is ugly and conniving, Rachel is beautiful and blind. Rachel relies on her sister for a proper understanding of the world, but Helen takes advantage of her blindness and spins tall tales of a dark variety.
"It's all about storytelling and what you believe," Wallace said on The State of Things. "She has power because she's in control of the story. And her beautiful little sister goes through most of her life believing that the world is a dark and terrible place."
Wallace, a professor of English at UNC-Chapel Hill, said that his latest novel came to him first as a paragraph, and that he revisited it steadily over time.
"I had written the first paragraph of this book years ago..." he said. "Periodically, I would go back to it and try to figure out what it was. Eventually, I did."
Daniel Wallace talking about his new book
