Because I love Alice I gave her a hot SEN-teacher-boyfriend-cum-Ted-whisperer, a flexible job, oodles of money and the prospect of a specialised SEN school on the horizon, so that she can best support Charlotte. In reality this is a highly unlikely scenario. It is very difficult to obtain support for autistic children in the UK (and especially those with PDA) - a situation which has worsened since Covid - and yet it profoundly impacts a child’s experience of school and accordingly their sense of self-worth and their future prospects.

If you do not have experience with autism I hope that Charlotte and Alice’s (and Jules’s) stories resonate with you nonetheless and help you to, like Charlotte, see the world a little differently. Not better, not worse, just different.

To better understand autism I recommend the book ‘Uniquely Human: A Different Way of Seeing Autism’ by Dr. Barry M. Prizant Ph.D with Tom Fields-Meyer.

For an introduction to PDA I recommend listening to episode 121 of Neurodiversity Podcast: Understanding Pathological Demand Avoidance with Harry J. Thompson.

Acknowledgements

A book is a collaborative effort: thanks to Laura Palmer, Anna Nightingale, Bianca Gillam, Kate Appleton, Ayo Okojie, Nelle Andrew and the teams at Head of Zeus and Rachel Mills Literary Agency respectively who have worked to publish this book and help it find its way into readers’ hands. I am enormously grateful.

Thanks also to my readers and the champions of the publishing world: book bloggers. I don’t like to have favourites but especially those of you who have recommended one of my books to a friend, posted on social media or written a review. Such efforts warm my antsy writer’s heart.

I had the idea for After Paris when I was writing Everything’s Perfect in 2017. It had been at the back of mind, gestating, from then until I came to write it last year. I knew that Jules was an addict, and struggling with undiagnosed neurodiversity, but I couldn’t quite figure out what she was addicted to until a friend, Chris Gilham, bravely shared the story of his gambling addiction online. As I read – with surprise – his account, I realised this was the missing part of Jules’s story: she was a compulsive gambler. I’m hugely grateful to Chris not only for sharing his experience – which both educated and enlightened me – but also for reading a draft of After Paris and sharing his thoughts. While researching this book I listened to a number of recovery podcast episodes, notably from All Bets Are Off (which Chris Gilham co-hosts) and Hooked: The Unexpected Addicts, both of which I highly recommend. I am awed by the strength and courage of the hosts and contributors.

Many of Nina’s baking creations were fantasies of my own imagination but those that were not were inspired by Claudia Roden’s A New Book Of Middle Eastern Food.

Thanks to Billy Thomas for a crash course in poker and reading through the poker scene many, many times; John McGinley for odds-calculations; Rupert Beecroft for help in the planning stages of this book; Christopher M. Hawkes Esq. who is always on good form; Tom Butterworth, for his enthusiasm and support; Olivia Berreen for checking my rusty French; and to my early readers, Rebecca Keane, Claire Bushell and Katie Butterworth.