Age: Early 40s.
Appearance: Surprisingly happy for a novelist.
That's one hell of a grin. Has she just signed a multimillion-pound rights deal? Not that we know of.
Or won a pointless but lucrative literary prize? That neither.
Hmm. So why should we care about some la-di-da bookworm? Because she has been endorsed by the most powerful man in the world.
Simon Cowell? The other one. Stuart's novel The Tower, The Zoo and The Tortoise was the only non-American book that Barack Obama took on holiday with him last month.
Oh, that most powerful man. Has anyone else been reading it? Enough people to send it into the top 25 of the New York Times hardback fiction bestsellers list. Not bad for a woman whom The Australian called a "flop novelist".
So what's it about? A tower, a zoo and a tortoise, of course. The tower is the Tower of London, the zoo is the royal menagerie and the tortoise is the 180-year-old Mrs Cooke. Looking after her is a Beefeater whose wife works in London Underground's lost property office. Three years ago they lost their son. "The cuteness sometimes comes across a little thick," says Publishers Weekly, but "the love story is adorable". In Britain, the book is called Balthazar Jones and the Tower of London Zoo.
Has Stuart written anything else? Her first novel, The Matchmaker of Périgord, was the story of a French provincial barber forced to try a new career. Joanne "Chocolat" Harris called it a "hilarious romp".
Is she a particularly slow typist, or has she been doing something else with her life? She used to write for newspapers, and spent eight years with a little-known publication called the Independent. She grew up in the West Midlands, and has spent time in France, Spain and Bahrain, but now lives in Egypt.
Do say: "If it's good enough for the President . . ."
Don't say: "I thought he only read the Qur'an."
