Also at Sourcebooks I thank Sarah Riley, Heather Moore, Tony Viardo, Christiaan Simmons, and Whitney Lehman. Thank you so much, each of you, for being the first encouraging contacts beyond my world of words. You gave the dream its first mantles of reality. On a chilly October day in Naperville it was the warmth and energy of your belief which made the book begin to feel real. Your spirits transformed mine, and in those short friendly moments I grew from a doctor fiddling around with stories into a writer with a readership. Thank you for then, thank you for now, and thank you for all that is to come.
To Te d Carmichael at Sourcebooks, for all your patient emails and edits, for your polite queries and tireless corrections, I thank you most. For the referencing and the footnotes, thank you, and please can you show me how to do that when we next meet? That you could read both my innumerable comments and Hillel's anguished writing straight from a nineteenth century prescription pad was truly heroic. What can I say, but “Holy Christ,” Ted, thank you!
And to the unflappable Stephen O'Rear: enormous thanks for the meticulous, fastidious, and tireless reviewing, advice, and dedicated commitment to the production of this book. You handled my last-minute, strained, extremely under-the-wire insertions with poise and aplomb. If production editor doesn't work out, consider neurosurgery! Thank you, Stephen, more than ever on this, the final day of writing.
And last, but never least, to the beginning.
To my teacher, Miss Connolly (or “Bernadette,” since I turned thirty). It began when you lent me The Borrowers Afloat. I was six, perhaps seven, when I decided to write a story inspired by that book. A generation ago, you carefully boxed the penciled, childish essay in your English attic. I still glimpse the memory of that story: longer than I was tall, lined paper pasted to purple backing which matched my velvet headband, the whole suspended high on the school notice board, all of it perched there by someone with long arms. I think it may have been you. It was with those brass drawing pins, you turned a small girl into a gap-toothed winner, a writer into someone who was read.
Thank you Bernadette for the first letters I learned. Thank you for the first books I read. Above all, thank you for the first invitation to write. You are my first agent, editor, publisher, and reader. You, my teacher, are my hero, I mean, “heroine,” as you will surely correct, in your red-inked flourish.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TRAINED IN NEW YORK CITY, Dr. Ahmed is a board certified pulmonologist and sleep specialist. She is currently appointed an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Medical University of South Carolina at Charleston, where she lives and practices.
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Full Title
Copyright
Dedication
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Rugged Glory
Endnotes
Bibliography
Reading Group Guide
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Back cover