Susan Moss, my best friend forever and now partner in crime on the detail of the manuscript, Jacquelyn Heslop, my ‘sis’ in another life, and my PA, Olivia Riley, who miraculously manages to decipher my scribble and introduced me to the concept of an armillary sphere.

It was a starlit night in early January 2013 when I first came up with the idea of writing allegorically about my seven mythical sisters. I called the family together and sat by the fire, bubbling over with excitement and trying to explain what I wanted to do. To give them credit, not a single one of them said I was mad – though I must have sounded so at the time as the ideas began to grow. So it is to them I owe the biggest thank you for what has happened since. My darling husband and agent, Stephen – we have been on an exhilarating journey together in the past year and both learned a lot. And my fantastic children: Harry, who makes all my wonderful films; Leonora, who came up with the very first anagram – ‘Pa Salt’; Kit, my youngest who can always make me laugh; and of course Isabella Rose, my amazing ‘high-voltage baby’ of eighteen, to whom this book is aptly dedicated.

Bibliography

The Seven Sisters is a work of fiction set against a historical and mythological background. The sources I’ve used to research the time period and detail on my characters’ lives are listed below:

Munya Andrews, The Seven Sisters of the Pleiades (Spinifex Press, 2004)

Dan Franck, Bohemian Paris (Grove Press, 2001)

Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (Penguin, 2011)

Robert Graves, The White Goddess, a Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (Faber and Faber, 1975)

Michèle Lefrançois, Paul Landowski: L’oeuvre sculpté (Crèaphis editions, 2009)

Jeffrey D. Needell, A Tropical Belle Époque (Cambridge, 2009)

Maria Izabel Noronha, De Braços Abertos (documentary) (2008)

Maria Izabel Noronha, Redentor: De Braços Abertos (Reptil Editora, 2011)

Peter Robb, A Death in Brazil (Bloomsbury, 2005)

Nigel Spivey, Songs of Bronze (Faber and Faber, 2005)