I shall never know what happened at Robert College during its last years as a US-owned university. In this novel I have constructed a parallel world to explore avenues closed to me in real life. Though my characters are as fictitious as the murder in which they are implicated, I have tried to portray the larger events that shape their lives as accurately as possible. Wherever feasible, I have referred to the newspaper accounts that the characters would have been reading at the time. These are named as they appear in the text.
The figures listed in Jeannie’s ‘brutal endnote’ on pp 276–277 are taken from ‘File of Torture: Deaths in Detention Places or Prisons (12th September 1980 – 12th September 1995)’, published by the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey in Ankara in 1996.
My only other source was a series of unclassified CIA interviews with a disgruntled Soviet citizen. These can be found at www.foia.ucia.gov: Case No EO-1991–00231. They bear no direct relation to the story: my interest was in the language.
I would like to thank Ruth Christie for granting permission to echo and reproduce her translation of Nazim Hikmet’s ‘A Journey’.
I would also like to thank my agent Pat Kavanagh for her magnificence, Catheryn Kilgarriff, Rebecca Gillieron and Amy Christian at Marion Boyars for their inspired professionalism, and my family for their love and understanding.
And I am deeply grateful to my friends Nicci Gerrard, Joseph Olshan, Jennifer Potter, Joan Smith, Richard and Sheila Thornley, and Becky Waters. You know why.