City of the Lost

AUTHOR’S NOTE

There is always a risk, with stories like these, of plots being overtaken by real events. Even as I was finishing my first draft, the Gezi Park protests started in Taksim Square in Istanbul then spread quickly across Turkey. And, shortly afterwards, the Egyptian army ousted its second president in less than thirty months. This book contains echoes of both episodes, but as it was substantively completed before either took place, any parallels are genuinely coincidental.

I grew up on the Greek myths and legends; I must have read my children’s editions of the Iliad and the Odyssey a dozen times each. I’ve long hankered, therefore, to write a book based on the Trojan War, and what happened to its heroes in its aftermath. But discovering the truth about Troy is surprisingly hard, not least because of the impenetrability of the ensuing Dark Ages, and the radically different theories about them. That, essentially, is where the chronological and archaeological ideas at the heart of this book came from. For anyone interested in learning more about them, I’d warmly recommend Peter James’ Centuries of Darkness or David Rohl’s The Lords of Avaris.

A note on place names. Much of this book is set in Cyprus, where towns and cities typically have different names in Greek and Turkish. To make life as easy as possible for readers, I have used anglicized versions of the more familiar Greek names throughout — most notably Nicosia instead of Lefkos¸a, and Famagusta rather than Gazimağusa — even in situations where the characters involved would likely have used the Turkish names.

My thanks — as ever — to my agent Luigi Bonomi, to my editor Sarah Hodgson at HarperCollins, and to my copy editor Anne O’Brien, who each helped make the book significantly better than it otherwise would have been. I’m also deeply indebted to all those who so generously shared their knowledge and time with me during my research and on my travels. Finally, I’d like to thank my friend Clive Pearson, who first drew my attention to the mysteries of Dark Ages chronology, and who was kind enough to read an early draft of this book to check for the usual mistakes. Any that remain are, as ever, mine and mine alone.