Believing the Lie

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As an American writing a series set in the UK, I am continually in the debt of people in England who willingly help me in the early stages of my research. For this novel, I’m extremely grateful to the staff and owners of Gilpin Lodge in Cumbria who provided me a lovely safe haven from which to launch my exploration into the countryside that became the backdrop for this novel. The Queen’s Guide to the Sands— Cedric Robinson— was a generous and invaluable source of information on Morecambe Bay, having spent all of his life living on the bay and most of his life guiding people across its perilous expanse at low tide. Mr. Robinson’s wife Olive graciously welcomed me into their eight-hundred-year-old cottage and allowed me to pick her brains as well as those of her husband during my time in Cumbria. The ever resourceful Swati Gamble of Hodder and Stoughton once again proved that, armed with the Internet and a telephone, nothing is impossible for her.

In the United States, Bill Solberg and Stan Harris helped me in matters pertaining to lakeside life, and a chance encounter with Joanne Herman in the San Francisco greenroom of a Sunday morning talk show put me in possession of her book Transgender Explained for Those Who Are Not. Caroline Cossey’s book My Story elucidated better than anything the pain and confusion of gender dysphoria and the prejudice one faces having made the decision to do something about it.

I’m grateful for the support of my husband, Thomas McCabe, for the always cheerful presence of my personal assistant Charlene Coe, and for the readings of early drafts of this novel done by my longtime cold reader Susan Berner and by Debbie Cavanaugh. My professional life is made smoother through the efforts of my literary agent, Robert Gottlieb of Trident Media Group, as well as my British publishing team of Sue Fletcher, Martin Nield, and Karen Geary at Hodder and Stoughton. With this novel, I join a new American publishing team at Dutton, and I’m grateful for the confidence in my work expressed by my editor and publisher Brian Tart.

Finally, to my readers who are interested in Cumbria and its crowning jewel— the Lake District— all of the places in this novel are real, as is the case in all my books. I have merely picked them up and moved them when necessary. Ireleth Hall stands in for Levens Hall, the home of Hal and Susan Bagot; the Faircloughs’ boathouse can actually be found in Fell Foot Park; Arnside House stands in for Blackwell, the Arts and Crafts beauty on the shore of Lake Windermere; Bryan Beck farm grew from an Elizabethan manor house called Townend; and Bassenthwaite village became Bryanbarrow village, complete with ducks. Playing God with locations such as these is part of the pleasure of writing fiction.

Elizabeth George

Whidbey Island, Washington