My thanks must firstly go to the remarkable team of people at Hamish Hamilton and Penguin Books. I am especially grateful for the talent, insights and generous support of my editors Simon Prosser, Anna Kelly and Juliette Mitchell. I’m proud to be with a publisher that champions some of the best literary fiction being written today. Long may they thrive. I’m also grateful to my publicist, Lija Kresowaty, for her energy and skill; my copy-editor, Sarah Coward, for her exceptionally fine eye; and editorial assistant Marissa Chen for her enthusiasm and ready help.
Equally, I’d like to extend my thanks to my agent, David Godwin of DGA, whose passion for literature is always inspiring, and to Heather Godwin, for her kind support behind the scenes at DGA. I’m also grateful to Kirsty McLachlan, Caitlin Ingham and Anna Watkins for their thoughtful words and efforts on this book’s behalf.
Thanks are due to my good friends Karen Steven and Hugh Dun-kerley. Each read the manuscript at a crucial point in its development, and offered vital perspectives and suggestions. I would also like to thank my friends Theresa Burgess, Rebecca Ford, Jackie Quinn, Adam Marek, Sally O’Reilly and Sue Roe for their good company and generous understanding of the writing life.
In the last six years, Diana Reich, Artistic Director of the Inter-national Charleston Festival, has offered me kind support, and that has been a gift. Di Speirs at the BBC has been a warm and generous presence; her interest in my work has been invaluable. Helen Dunmore’s encouragement has meant a great deal and is much appreciated. Cathy Galvin, Director of Word Factory, has been another great inspiration.
Funding from the Canada Council for the Arts arrived in 2008, just when I needed it most, and I’m profoundly grateful to the Council and my native land for these lifelines it offers its writers. In the UK, I’m also very grateful for the Authors’ Foundation, which offered me generous financial assistance. The lovely people at Book-trust do the most wonderful things to promote writers, and I’m very lucky to have been on the receiving end. I’m fortunate, too, to share in the dynamic literary culture my colleagues and students – past and present – create at the University of Chichester.
My mother, Freda MacLeod, my sisters Kate MacLeod and Ellen MacLeod, and my sister-in-law, Liz Payne, have been unfailingly supportive. The writing of any novel is a marathon of sorts – at times exhilarating and at times gruelling – and it’s a process that extends over years. It has always meant so much to me to have their love and encouragement, and never more than during the writing of Unexploded.
I am indebted to the work of Virginia Woolf and specifically, to her novels The Waves and The Years, and to her essay ‘The Leaning Tower’. Woolf ’s life and work have been an inspiration, and I am very fortunate to have been able to cite from her work.
I am also indebted to Brighton Behind the Front: Photographs & Memories of the Second World War, which was compiled and published by the ever-impressive QueenSpark Books of Brighton. An account from this book – reproduced with the permission of the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex – is the source of my character Frank Dunn’s description of the bombing of the Brighton Odeon on 14 September 1940.
Unexploded is a work of fiction. While great care has been taken to create an authentic picture of the period and place, it is not always possible to serve the literary demands of a narrative and each historical fact in a single work. This novel features major and minor events from the period May 1940 to June 1941. This said, it should not be taken as an entirely accurate historical record of that year.
Alison MacLeod