There are so many people without whom this novel wouldn’t have seen the light of day, and I thank them all for their contributions, both large and small.
I’m indebted, in particular, to the fantastic team at Harvill Secker: to my editor, Jade Chandler, for helping turn a shed into a greenhouse; to Anna Redman for her tireless work over almost four years; to Sophie Painter for her fantastic marketing campaigns and to Kris Potter for his wonderful artwork. I must also thank Katherine Fry for her eagle eyes. I’m also grateful to Jane Kirby, Monique Corless, Sam Coates and Penny Liechti in the rights team for helping Sam and Surrender-not travel across continents. Thanks too, to Liz Foley, Rachel Cugnoni, Richard Cable, Bethan Jones, Alex Russell, Tom Drake-Lee and the wider team at Vintage for all their support, and to my agent, Sam Copeland, and the team at Rogers, Coleridge and White for all their hard work.
A special thank you is due to Christina Ellicott at Vintage and to all the staff at Waterstones for being such great supporters of the books and giving the first in the series, A Rising Man, such a wonderful start.
A debt of gratitude is owed to Vaseem Khan, Ayisha Malik, Alex Caan, AA Dhand and Imran Mahmood, all fantastic authors and known collectively as Team Dishoom, for their support and for the esoteric Twitter conversations.
Thanks of course, to all those good friends who let me borrow their names without worrying about what I’d do with them: to Darren Callaghan, Scott Lamont, Mathilde Rouvel, Alastair Dunlop and Iain McGuire.
Thanks too, to Darren Sharma for all the free lunches and the half a dozen emails which appear without fail in my inbox each morning; to the staff at the Idea Store Canary Wharf for offering me sanctuary; and to my partners at Houghton Street Capital, Hash, Alok and Neeraj, for putting up with my diva-esque tendencies and questionable work ethic. These are unlikely to change any time soon.
Thank you to Jonny Flint for bringing some sort of order to the chaos that is the Mukherjee house; to my boys, Milan and Aran, the source of so much of that chaos; and finally of course, thank you to my wife, Sonal, who puts up with so much and asks for so little. I’m blessed to be with you.