Thanks to the AHRC for awarding me the funding that allowed me to research and complete this novel. To Graham Mort and Mike Greaney for being such encouraging supervisors and pushing me to experiment. To Jonathan Taylor and George Green for advice that helped me find the best way to bridge the gap between PhD and publishing. To staff and fellow students in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University for continual support and advice. To Yvonne Battle-Felton for positivity, inspiration and generally being my unofficial life-coach. To Vicki Howarth and Aasiya Mota for early reading and valuable opinion.

Thanks to Penny Thomas for the most generous rejection I ever received and believing in the novel enough to give it a second chance. To Mick Felton and all at Seren for producing such a beautiful book and pushing me to make it better. To Nemonie Craven for astute feedback and insight – thank you for helping me remove the red herrings and deepen connections.

To my family and friends – thank you for being in my corner. Writing is solitary (even for an introvert) and it’s easy to lose hope!

Finally, to Stephan and Anna, for beautiful(and necessary) distractions, and never letting me give up.

About the Author

Naomi Krüger’s short stories have been published in various literary journals and her first novel manuscript was highly commended in the Yeovil Literary Prize 2014. She has an MA and PhD from Lancaster University and currently lectures in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Central Lancashire where she researches representations of cognitive impairment in fiction as well as working on new writing projects. She is also the co-creative director of North West Literary Arts, an organization facilitating events and comm-unity projects in Lancashire.

The idea for May, and her interest in memory and representations of dementia, followed a visit to a family friend in the early stages of dementia who remembered things about Naomi’s own life that she herself had forgotten. Naomi was born in Preston and still lives there with her husband and daughter.