“Well, it’s certainly tragic,” I say. “But as tragedies go, quite romantic. If you’re asking whether that would put me off…It wouldn’t. Anything else I should know?”

“Just that the owner can be a bit of a tyrant. I must have shown dozens of prospective tenants around in the last few weeks, and none of them have been accepted.”

“Believe me, I know how to deal with tyrants. I lived with one for six years.”

And so that evening I find myself leafing through the endless pages of the application form. So many rules to read! And so many questions to answer! It’s tempting to get myself a drink to help me through it but I haven’t had one for almost three weeks now and I’m trying to keep it that way.

Please make a list of every possession you consider essential to your life.

I take a deep breath and pick up my pen.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many, many people helped over the decade or so it took me to work out how to tell this story. I’d particularly like to thank the producer Jill Green for her early encouragement; Laura Palmer for her typically insightful responses to an unfinished draft; Tina Sederholm for a poet’s perspective; and Dr. Emma Fergusson for advice on medical matters and much more.

At Penguin Random House, my deep gratitude goes to Kate Miciak, not only for buying the book and whisking a fifty-page sample almost overnight to her colleague Denise Cronin and her remarkable team at the Frankfurt Book Fair, but also for the months of stimulating debate, impeccable craftsmanship, and editorial passion that followed.

My greatest debt, though, is to Caradoc King and his team at United Agents—Mildred Yuan, Millie Hoskins, Yasmin McDonald, and Amy Mitchell—who read the initial pages when the story was barely more than a suggestion. Without their enthusiasm and belief, I doubt it would ever have been more than that.

This book is dedicated to my indomitable, unfailingly cheerful son Ollie, one of the very few people in the world born with Type B Joubert syndrome, and to the memory of his older brother, Nicholas, our boy before.