Joe Country

Acknowledgments

My thanks, as ever, to the teams at John Murray in London—especially Mark Richards, Yassine Belkacemi, Jess Kim, and Becky Walsh—and at Soho Press in New York—especially Bronwen Hruska, Juliet Grames, Paul Oliver and Rachel Kowal—for all the hard work and effort they put into making me look good.

And to Juliet Burton and Micheline Steinberg for taking care of business.

And to my mother, my siblings, their attachments and their offspring for being there.

One of the great perks of this job is the opportunity it affords to spend time in the company of writers. Allowing one to stand for many, I’m grateful to Lucy Atkins for support, advice, friendship and innumerable cups of coffee here in Oxford. Happily, I met with similar warmth and friendship far from home while working on this book, from those involved in translating, publishing and selling the slow horses abroad, or whose paths simply crossed mine along the way. So many thanks to, among others, Anik Lapointe, Anna von Planta, Charles Cumming, Claudia Cucchiarato, Daniela Seyfarth, Darrel Bristow-Bovey, Eugene Ashton, Jonathan Ball, Kate Turkington, Peter Cunningham, Philipp Keel, Ruth Geiger, Stefanie Schäfer, Stephanie Uhlig, and especially Nkanyezi Tshabalala, for making travel a pleasure, when I so often fear it will be an ordeal.

Mostly, though, my debts fall closer to home. Joe country would be nowhere without joes; Joe Country would not have been written without Jo. Thanks are not enough.

—MH

Oxford, February 2019