After the Fire

Afterword

There may be some readers who think they recognise the islands, bays, skerries and people in this novel, in spite of the fact that no archipelago in the world can be laid on top of my geographical and human map to produce a perfect match.

I often think about the invisible postglacial rebound when I write. It is a constant, even though we are unable to perceive it with our eyes or our other senses. A shoreline is always something unfinished, slipping away, drifting. A piece of fiction relates to reality in the same way. There may be similarities between the two, but above all it is the difference that determines what has happened and what could have happened.

That is the way it must be because the truth is always provisional, always changeable.

Henning Mankell

Antibes, March 2015