East Fortune is a real place, twenty miles east of Edinburgh, but the Henderson family home, the kirk and the river are all fictional.
I am grateful to the Meiklejohn, Stuart-Smith, Raven, and Balfour families for their inspiration.
I would like to thank early readers, friends, and colleagues: Georgina Brown, Magdalena Buchan, Douglas Cairns, Peter Chalmers, Pip Clothier, David Godwin, Erica Jarnes, Neville Kidd, Anna Ledgard, Rona Lewis, Allan Little, Joanna MacGregor, Juliette Mead, Henry and Merrie McKenzie-Johnston, Mary Morris, Alex Nicholson, Kathryn Patrick, Sarah Peat, Luisa Pretolani, Alexandra Pringle, Marie Lou Shoenmakers, Gillian Stern, Mary Tomlinson, Pip Torrens, Jo Willett.
I have relied on the Loeb Classical Library version of the De Rerum Natura by Lucretius (On the Nature of Things, Harvard, 1975) and the translation by the American poet Rolfe Humphries (The Way Things Are, Indiana University Press, 1968).