Three Rooms is a novel about the danger of withholding capital, principally domestic and financial. Through the unconditional faith and care of a large cohort of people, I have been the beneficiary of both while writing this book, and of much love.
To my parents, who did not bat an eye when I left my job and holed up in their house to write a book that might have amounted to nothing at all—I love you. Dziękuje też mojej babci. Część tej książki została napisana u Ciebie, na wsi. Czuję w niej Twoją miłość.
Thom Insley, Sophie Haydock, Charlie Selvaggi-Castelletti, Benjamin Wood, Nicole Seredenko, Alice Bonomini Borges: whether in part or in full, you read it first, and kept me going. I owe you drinks. Serena Buccoliero, Rosy Cooley, Sveva Scenarelli: before, during, and after my writing this book, you’ve always made sure I had a home with you. I will always do the same in turn.
To Dredheza Maloku, Ana Fletcher, Naomi Gibbs, and Harriet Moore . . . you’ve changed my life completely. My first room of my own, the ability to do what I love, is down to your kindness and commitment. For that, and to everyone at Jonathan Cape, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and David Higham, I am immeasurably and eternally yours.
Finally, quotations can be found throughout from Walter Pater’s The Renaissance, Rosemary Tonks’s “The Sofas, Fogs, and Cinemas” and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. I am also incredibly grateful to Hannah Sullivan, whose Three Poems and Tenants instructed my work, and whose emails have shown invaluable patience and support. Further acknowledgments go to the LRB classifieds, articles from the Times, Tatler, and Guardian, Sting and the Police, the inventiveness of protesters holding signs at the anti-Brexit March of 2019, members of the Memory Lane Facebook page, and the testimony which makes up the Grenfell Fire Inquiry Phase 1 Report. Transcriptions, personally made, from the 2019 Conservative Party leadership election have also been used.