First thanks go to my invaluable champion of an agent, Hayley Steed. There aren’t enough Reese’s peanut butter cups in the world for me to adequately express my gratitude, but I am the luckiest of authors to be able to call you my friend and teammate. Thank you, always, for everything you do (I know I’m probably only aware of about 70 percent of what you actually do behind the scenes for me and my career), and for so graciously putting up with me pitching you a new book idea approximately every 3.7 weeks.
Thanks to Sarah St. Pierre, Adrienne Kerr, Rita Silva, Cali Platek, and the team at Simon & Schuster Canada for your work on this project. To Olivia Barber and Olivia Robertshaw at Hodder UK for their valuable feedback on the first and second drafts, respectively, and to Kate Norman for guiding it to production. Thank you to my former UK editor and author friend Sara Nisha Adams for your support for the original story, its reimagination, and for taking the time to so eloquently describe what Islington smells like in the autumn (I’ve only ever visited London in the spring!).
One of the most wonderful surprises of my new career is the opportunity it’s afforded for me to really get to know some incredible women I otherwise would have only been able to admire from a distance. It’s an honour and a joy to be part of this community.
Thank you to my talented author pals Genevieve Graham, Charlene Carr, Natalie Jenner, Marissa Stapley, Amita Parikh, and Ellen Keith for your generosity of spirit and willingness to lend an ear, and to my additional early readers Kristin Harmel, Patti Callaghan Henry, Janet Skeslien Charles, Louise Fein, Karma Brown, Rachel McMillan, Caroline Bishop, Andie Newton, Roberta Rich, and Margaret DeRosia for taking time away from your own busy lives and projects to provide such generous endorsements for Audrey. And thank you to Kate Quinn for gently preparing me for the fact that the whole process of releasing a novel into the world will never become any less nerve-racking than it was the first time. Swallowing moths, indeed!
Special thanks to Jim for composing “Ilse’s Theme,” and somehow knowing precisely the sound I was going for. It was so special to be able to listen to it play in real life (and in my head) while I finished off this story.
I began writing the draft of this book when I was on maternity leave with my first child. As a rookie mum, I had no idea how difficult it would truly be to write a good novel with a newborn in tow, hormonal, and more bone-crushingly exhausted than I’d ever felt in my life. I’d written novels before, so I knew what was required to make that happen, but I’d never raised a baby before, and I still had a lot to learn on the job about being a mum. I also wildly underestimated the impact chronic, severe sleep deprivation and distraction would have on my mental energy and creative juices. I’m a firm believer that success rarely—if ever—happens in a vacuum, and I simply could not have accomplished this feat without the support of my family: the countless hours of quality childcare provided by my parents, Auntie K, and my mother-in-law, and my husband’s love, reassurance, and well-timed snack deliveries. I cannot thank you all enough for what you did to enable me to continue on with my writing career after having a baby.
If not for the pandemic and having a newborn, I would have been thrilled to visit the German Resistance Memorial Center in person when I first began writing the book. But when my brother announced that he was going to be visiting Berlin, I all but demanded he visit the GRMC for me to collect photos and hard copies of resistance documents. He also returned with several heartrending photos of the “stumbling stone” plaques around the city that commemorate the victims of the Holocaust, and which inspired the inclusion of the epilogue. So special thanks are due to my bro for being such a great bro to this housebound new mama.
And finally, thank you, readers.
I will be forever stunned by your response to my debut Looking for Jane. Many writers need to write, in the same way we need a myriad of other sustenance in our lives, from water, to love, and meaning. My heart needed to write Jane because I thought it was about time we started actually talking about the things we had only before whispered about. I hoped it might get published. I hoped a few people might read it. And then you took a story that, in my astonished mind, is still just scribbled sentences in my dogeared notebook, and you started talking.
You helped Jane reach tens of thousands of readers across Canada and around the world, you gifted it to each other, recommended it, waited months to check it out from your local libraries, and chose it for your book clubs because the themes in it resonated on a profoundly personal level. Since Jane’s publication, I’ve received hundreds of messages from readers sharing stories of heartbreak, horror, relief, connection, understanding, and hope—all the emotions I felt while writing it, and that is such a beautiful thing: that what I felt in my heart came out on the page and found its way into yours. For writers, having readers connect to our stories is the greatest professional joy and triumph, and we would be nothing without you.