But Burnham has also overpaid: In 2005, he acquired Sacred Games, Vikram Chandra’s sprawling 1,200-page saga about the Mumbai underworld, for $1 million. It sold just 34,000 copies in hardcover. To be considered a hit, Bright Shiny Morning will have to sell about 375,000 copies in hardcover, a quarter more than the initial print run. (It is common for publishers to have multiple print runs; Bright Shiny Morning will also be released in paperback.)

Whether such high-profile deals make money or not, Burnham believes they can serve a valuable marketing purpose. “The advance establishes the book as a phenomenon,” Burnham says. “It catches the interest of the trade and, sometimes, the general media.”

Burnham and Frey met at a party the publisher hosted at his Manhattan apartment—it was one of the first mediacentric social events Frey had attended since his public chastisement—and the two became friendly. When it came time for Frey’s new agent to float the author’s comeback project, he approached Burnham exclusively, and Burnham liked what he read. “It’s a big, ambitious novel, written in that James Frey, button-pushing, visceral style,” Burnham says of Bright Shiny Morning, which intertwines the lives of dozens of characters who live in Los Angeles. Burnham moved quickly to sign a deal before other publishers had the opportunity to bid on the book.

Yet as the reviver of Frey’s career, the British-born Burnham cuts an unlikely figure. Before arriving in the U.S. in 1998, Burnham, now 47, ran the British publishing house Chatto & Windus. There, he put out books by American authors such as Toni Morrison, in addition to the first cookbook by Nigella Lawson, one of his college roommates. He had a brief stint at Penguin before being recruited by another British import, editor Tina Brown, to run Talk Miramax Books. The buzzy publishing house was eventually folded into Hyperion.

“He was the one part of that crazy Talk era that was really going well,” Brown says. (Among the authors he recruited were former secretary of state Madeleine Albright and Manhattan “it” girl Plum Sykes.) Burnham and his partner, Joe Dolce, a freelance writer and former editor of Star magazine, are one of New York’s A-list media couples, written about in gossip and publishing columns. Burnham is also a classically trained pianist who can occasionally be glimpsed playing cabaret shows around the city.

At Harper, where he moved in the months after Talk closed, Burnham says he has made money for the company, even as HarperCollins has struggled, recently registering double-digit drops in sales. But his boss, HarperCollins C.E.O. Jane Friedman, admits they are taking a chance with Bright Shiny Morning. “James Frey is a brilliant novelist. Whatever came before, I place no judgment on it,” Friedman says. Still, “the rule of thumb is, the more you pay, the harder it is to make it back.”