The quotation from Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground uses Constance Garnett’s translation.
For various forms of support, and encouragement, many thanks to my parents Gail L. Flanery and James A. Flanery, and also to Ben Arnoldy, Rita Barnard, Glenn Breuer, Rebecca Carter, Dirk Klopper, Michele Gemelos, Michael Holtmann, the MacLeod family (Marti, Alasdair, Kirsty, Catriona and Annabel), Peter McCullough and Thomas Knollys, Stephanie Nolen, Kimberly Ochs, Ann Pasternak Slater, Goran Stanivukovic, Cynthia Stone, Michael Titlestad, and Marlene van Niekerk. I owe a special debt of gratitude to family and friends in South Africa, most especially to Nan and Eddie van der Vlies, Sandra Willows and Camel du Plessis, Natasha Distiller and Lisa Retief and their son Jesse, Undine Weber, Deborah Seddon, Angela Rae and Justin Cornish, Lucy Graham, and Wendy Jacobson.
I am deeply grateful to my agent Victoria Hobbs and her colleagues Jennifer Custer and Kate Rizzo Munson, as well as to my agent in America, George Lucas. Many thanks are also due to my editors Margaret Stead, Ravi Mirchandani, Sarah McGrath, and Michael Schellenberg.
This book would not have been possible, or ever come to exist in the first place, without Andrew van der Vlies.
About the Author
PATRICK FLANERY was born in California in 1975 and raised in Omaha, Nebraska. After earning a BFA in Film from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts he worked for three years in the film industry before moving to the UK, where he completed a doctorate in Twentieth-Century English Literature at the University of Oxford. As well as publishing scholarly articles on British and South African literature and film in a number of academic journals, he has written for Slightly Foxed and the Times Literary Supplement. He lives in London.