Fear Not

Author’s Afterword

This book is a novel, and is therefore not true. To be a writer is to lie, to make things up, to invent. This means that you can describe a cellar at the Hotel Continental, for example, without even knowing whether or not it exists. I know nothing about the hotel’s air-conditioning system, nor do I know whether the hotel has a system of CCTV cameras which is out of date. I hope I am forgiven for using the building as part of the backdrop for my story; it’s just so perfect.

What is true, however, is that in many countries there are a number of groups united in particular by their hatred and contempt for certain sections of society. It is also true that some of these groups are fairly systematic in their use of violence against the people they hate. Some of them have demonstrably perpetrated the most serious crimes in order to finance their macabre projects. It is also true, unfortunately, that murder and acts of terrorism have been carried out in the name of various gods all over the world since time immemorial. All the hate groups mentioned in this novel actually exist, with the exception of The 25’ers.

APLC does not exist. It is, however, modelled on the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama. Their homepage (www.splcenter.org) with its links and suggestions for further reading has been extremely helpful in my work on this book.

Fear Not could not have been written without patience, loving encouragement and stubborn opposition from my spouse of ten years, Tina Kjær. Thanks to her, and to our daughter Iohanne, who cannot understand why I have to spend so much time in my office for four months of the year during the final phase of every new novel. We are heading for brighter days, my love.

Thanks also to Mariann Aalmo Fredin for valuable help along the way; to Berit Reiss-Andersen for everything she knows about the law, which I have long forgotten; and to my brother Even Holt, who always has piquant medical refinements to offer. A big thank you also to Kari Michelsen, who in May 2008 at a beach bar in France persuaded me to abandon a project which had been under way for a long time and to write this book instead.

Finally, a loving thank you to Picasso. She warms my feet while I write, forces me out in sunshine or rain, and gives me wholly undeserved, unconditional devotion.

ANNE HOLT

Nydalen, Oslo 2009