Turning from books to people, I actually regard it as a good, reassuring thing that many of my own “usual suspects” remain in my life to sustain and support me, along with a few new people. Lara Hinchberger and Jessica Wade were quick and thoughtful in their notes and attention to detail. Catherine Marjoribanks, our copy editor, informed me that this was our eleventh time working together, and copy editors know these things. That tells its tale of affinity, and my appreciation. My agents, John Silbersack and Jonny Geller, in New York and London, are trusted friends as well as professional associates, in both cases for many years now. This has been reassuring and rewarding, both.

I cannot here name and salute all the editors who have acquired and then shepherded my work into their languages but it feels past time to now express how much I value their doing so, and how much pleasure I take from seeing my books well presented in other countries and cultures. It remains one of the pleasures and rewards of what seems to have become a long career. If I single out Apriori, my Ukrainian house, and their gorgeously, bravely done editions in the midst of war, I hope it will be understood.

The internet and how people get their information has changed greatly but www.brightweavings.com remains my authorized site, with a great deal of information on it (some of it funny). It exists because of the initiative of Deborah Meghnagi twenty-five years ago, as I type these words, and it has been sustained by the attentiveness and the care of Alec Lynch. My appreciation for both is ongoing. Martin Springett has again done a map for one of my books. His art and his friendship, both, remain vivid for me.

Is it strange to thank one’s readers around the world? It doesn’t feel so. I have had a more-than-forty-years career of shaping novels. I have been allowed to do this, been able to take time in doing each one—a rare, even an astonishing gift in today’s book world—because people keep finding them, and urging them on others. Calling it a gift feels right.

My brother Rex is always my first reader, bringing focused intelligence to that, and a generous understanding of what I try to do in my work (in the books as a whole, and in each one individually). He knows my appreciation.

This will be the first of my novels that my mother doesn’t read. I feel that deeply. My parents—lovers of books, bonding over them on their first date, even—are remembered, always, with my love and gratitude, and now with a redoubled sense of loss and absence.

My wife and my sons carry the dedication to Written on the Dark. I have named them before in dedicating novels. It feels entirely right to do so again.

About the Author