Us

acknowledgements

I’d like to thank Hannah MacDonald, Michael McCoy, Roanna Benn, Damian Barr and Elizabeth Kilgarriff for their advice and encouragement. Also Paula Alexandre, Rhiannon Rose White, Malcolm Logan, Sadie Holland, Natalie Doherty, Dr Claire Isaac, Alison Moulding, Grenville Fox, Jane Brook and Andrew Shennan for their expertise. Any errors are all mine.

I’m grateful to Jonny Geller, Kirsten Foster and all at Curtis Brown, my editor Nick Sayers, Laura Macdougall, Emma Knight, Auriol Bishop and all the team at Hodder & Stoughton. Also Amber Burlinson, Ayse Tashkiran, Sophie Heawood and, in particular, Erica Stewart and Sands, the stillbirth and neonatal death charity (https://www.uk-sands.org/).

Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art was a great help, as were Wikipedia and Google Maps, and I discovered Nathaniel Hawthorne’s letter to Sophie Peabody in Evan S. Connell’s fine novel, Mr Bridge. The epigraph from Far From The Tree is reprinted by permission of The Random House Group, Lorrie Moore and Philip Larkin by permission of Faber, Penelope Fitzgerald by permission of 4th Estate and Elizabeth Taylor by permission of Virago, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group. While I’ve done my best to make Douglas’ journey accurate, I’ve sometimes made minor adjustments to reality. For instance, it is not possible to see the Prado from the Plaza de Cibeles, and neither is there a bench in front of Las Meninas.

Finally, love and gratitude is due to Hannah Weaver for her patience and humour, her encouragement and inspiration.