Thank you, Mum and Dad. I wouldn’t be here without your love and unwavering support.

To Belinda Bolliger and Mark Macleod for first showing faith in me and this story a long time ago.

To my early readers: Beth Gallate for thinking the first draft was already perfect at one thousand pages, and Jason Gallate for other superlatives I didn’t deserve but kept repeating to myself. To Drusilla Modjeska, for telling me I had a voice. You opened your door and invited me into another world. And to Martha Bentley, for getting me the moment we met, falling in love with Lincoln Locke and starting the Secret Middles twenty-four-hour support group. To dedicated members Maggie MacKellar, thank you for words that live between Earth and Heaven, and Our Kate Gordon for your constant buoyancy. #BeLikeTaffy.

To my publisher, Nikki Christer, for picking up something I feared was irredeemably broken and believing it could be rebuilt better, faster, stronger. To Celine for drafting a plan. To my lovely editors Catherine Hill and Tom Langshaw for your kindness, dedication, craftsmanship and perspective. You made this thing so much more than it was in my hands alone. To Alex Ross for your plucky cover design and to Mike Windle for your banter while snapping me. And thank you to all the other good people at Penguin Random House who I haven’t yet met but helped get this book out there.

Thank you to my agent, Jane Novak, for taking me on and keeping it real.

Special thanks to Louise McLeod Tabouis for booking me on a tour of the Musée des Art Forains in Paris. Riding the magnificent vélocipède changed everything. Thank you, Douglas Channing, for granting me conversations without time limits. To my colleagues over the years who’ve endured me banging on about this book and wondered if it would ever materialise – here it is! Thank you to all my dear friends for your encouragement and understanding why I was doing the hermit thing. To the real Bert and Percy, thank you for lending me your names. And to Coco for trotting into the pages as Tippi and performing your own rescue.

To everybody else in my family: George, Tanja, Xanthe, Zachary, Zoe, Angela, Che and Solomon. Thank you for the unconditional love.

Steven Berkoff’s stage adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis at the Nimrod Theatre blew my mind and reshaped my thinking when I was thirteen years old. And these brilliant books among many others helped me to build a world for my characters to inhabit and provided me with many missing pieces of the puzzle: Cole of the Book Arcade by Cole Turnley; Professional Savages: Captive Lives and Western Spectacle by Roslyn Poignant; The Showman and the Slave by Benjamin Reiss; War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race by Edwin Black; Freak Show by Robert Bogdan; Prelude to Christopher by Eleanor Dark.

Finally, to you, dear reader, thank you for coming all this way with me. Knowing you would one day be holding this in your hands kept me going.