This work owes much to the encouragement, literary fellowship and support of a number of colleagues and friends. For keeping the faith and for his excellent editorial insight, my sincerest thanks to Ivor Indyk. Thanks to Nick Tapper and Alice Grundy for their careful and sensitive reading. For crucial conversations about the writing in its many stages, gratitude to Kathleen Hill and Darcey Steinke (Sarah Lawrence College), Jennifer Tseng, Peter Bishop, Tif Loehnis, Virginia Peters, Adam Aitken and Roberta Lowing. Thank you to the magical Merrick Fry for nourishing the life of art in many tangible and intangible ways, to Tony Grech for organic affections and my good friend Wanda Greenaway for her loving-kindness. I was fortunate to benefit from a New Work grant from the Australia Council for the Arts and a Fellowship from the Yaddo Corporation, Saratoga Springs, New York, early on in the writing. My thanks also go, last but not least, to my aunt Livia de Abreu Noronha, who lived in Angola with her young family in the period leading up to Independence. In the initial stages of research she gave me a unique sense of place as well as resources that still bear up despite my having been able to find so many of my own errors of fact on Google. Any such inconsistencies, political inaccuracies, or worse infelicities are entirely my own although they issue from the sensibility and poetic licence of a much younger writer.