My first thanks and acknowledgements must go to the inspirational members of the real transatlantic book club; to Marie Doran and her colleagues in Clonmel, Tipperary; to the kind librarians on Twitter who helped me to find her; and to Terry and Kathy Tate in Peoria, Illinois. (Check out the P.S. section if you’d like to know how they inspired me!)
I’m so grateful to the lovely, supportive writing community on Twitter, and to the readers who chat with me there and on my Facebook page (which is called Felicity Hayes-McCoy Author), who email and message me about my books and send photos from your own book clubs. It’s wonderful to hear your feedback, to know that you love Fury, get cross with Mary, and sympathise with Hanna, and that you recognise Finfarran’s countryside, communities, and dynamics from your own lives. It’s also brilliant to see how a shared love of books, libraries, and reading can bring people together all across the world, and it seems to me that the more we reach out across boundaries these days, the better, so thank you to every one of you who’s contacted me, from Ireland to Alaska to Connecticut, from London, Berlin, and Dublin to Abu Dhabi, and from China to Australia and beyond.
Finally, huge thanks to my editor Rebecca Raskin and everyone at Harper Perennial; to the booksellers who welcome me in when I put my head round their doors; to my husband, Wilf Judd; to Markus Hoffmann at Regal Hoffmann & Associates in New York and, as ever, to my agent Gaia Banks, at Sheil Land Associates, UK.