I am grateful, as always, to my agent Judith Murdoch for help and encouragement. It was she who suggested I continue Clare’s story from On A Clear Day before I set out on the historical journey which took me back to 1861 and The Woman from Kerry, the story of Clare’s great-grandmother which leads on into the twentieth century and returns to Clare and Andrew in the 1960s.
My friends at the Irish Studies Centre, Armagh, have helped me once again and my husband, sister and closest friends have done some of the research I would have done myself had I been able to use my own legs.
Those who wrote to me and commented so generously on my earlier novels encouraged me greatly when writing proved to be very difficult, but my greatest debt, this time, must certainly be to the lovely people at Musgrave Park Hospital, Belfast, who gave me a second new hip so that I can once again walk my beloved green hills.
ANNE DOUGHTY