SOME YEARS AGO, OUR SON SENT US ON A LONG WEEKEND to Prague where we fetched up in the Museum of Communism. At that time, unlike its spanking and impressive home today, the artefacts were housed in a couple of rooms. But they left an indelible mark on me, including the black telephone in a small cell which rang when you stepped inside.

The novel is a direct result of that visit. However, I could not have written it without consulting many histories. I would like to single out Kevin McDermott’s lucid and admirable Communist Czechoslovakia, 1945–89 (Palgrave). Anyone wishing to get a handle on the complexities of that time could not do better than to read it. Also Ivan Klíma’s My Crazy Century, a Memoir (Grove Press, UK), Timothy Garton Ash’s The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague (Vintage Books), Under a Cruel Star: A life in Prague 1941–1968 by Heda Margolius Kovály (Granta) and the superb Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall by Anna Funder (Granta). I have taken facts, sentiments and scenarios from all of them. Any mistakes are mine.

I would like to thank my super-nova editor, Sara O’Keeffe, and the team at Corvus. Also my agent, Judith Murray, without whom none of this would be happening and Justine Taylor for her skilled, tactful and meticulous copy-editing. To my fellow novelists, Fanny Blake and Isabelle Grey, who have been on hand to mop the brow, I owe you much. Equally, the dear friends who visited on a regular basis, bearing medicaments and cheer, when shingles struck I will never forget. A big thank you to my sisters, Alison Souter and Rosie Hobhouse. To Jane Thynne, author of the bestselling Clara Vine novels set in Berlin, and Jim Mitchell, both experts on the city, who pointed me to the places to go I offer deep gratitude. If I have got anything wrong, I know you will let me know. However, I have invented a couple of extra streets around the Canal Saint Martin in Paris for the purposes of the novel. I hope I am forgiven.

To Benjie, Adam and Lucinda, Eleanor and Henry, Alexia and Flora… you make everything worthwhile.

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Italy
March 1977

HE WRAPPED HIS ARMS AROUND HER AND DREW HER EVEN closer. She knew then that he was telling her that he loved her but could not trust himself to say so.

It did not matter.

For that moment at least, tender and choked with emotion, they were at peace after the turbulence of longing and desire.