ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you so much to everyone who critiqued all or part of Congress of Secrets for me: Patrick Samphire, Justina Robson, Lisa Mantchev, David Burgis, Sarah Prineas, Jenn Reese, and Leah Cutter. I really appreciate your help!

Thank you so much to Patrick Samphire and Ben Burgis for reading first-draft chapters as I wrote them and cheering me along. Thank you to Justina Robson for saying at a crucial moment: Send it! And thank you to David Burgis for sharing my obsession with Habsburg history and trading wonderful research books with me over the years.

I owe an enormous thank-you to my parents, Richard and Kathy Burgis, for making it possible to edit this book at the same time as moving house. I genuinely could not have done it without you! And thank you so much to my husband, Patrick Samphire, for taking time in the middle of that house move to read and critique this book yet again. I appreciated it so much.

Thank you so much to my wonderful editor, Rene Sears, for believing in this book, and for helping me to make it stronger. Thank you to Lisa Michalski, my fabulous publicist at Pyr, and to Nicole Sommer-Lecht, who has created such beautiful covers for my books. Thank you to Sheila Stewart for the careful copyediting that’s saved me from my own mistakes so many times, and a huge thank you to my agent, Molly Ker Hawn, for representing this book so beautifully. I can’t imagine any better partner in publishing! I definitely owe you lots of chocolate.

Chocolate is also owed, along with profuse thanks, to Carly Silver, research goddess, who answered my last-minute cry for help on a particular historical detail and came up with the right answer within minutes. My book and I both thank you!

This is going back quite a way, but still, it really does have to be said: I am so grateful to the Fulbright Commission for sending me to spend a year at the University of Vienna, where I fell even more in (complicated) love with the city, after spending a six-month exchange program there two years earlier; and to my late grandfather, Emil Bauman, who encouraged me to go to Vienna in the first place, and who passed on his own Austro-Croatian father’s deep love of the city. That particular branch of my family may have had to flee Vienna in the early part of the twentieth century, but the emotional connection has held strong across the generations.

And, of course, I am deeply grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council here in the UK for supporting me in a two-week research trip back to Vienna, years later. I was meant, at the time, to be researching a doctoral thesis on Viennese opera and politics, and I promise that I really did do that research, in lovely long hours spent every day in the National Music Library, with the smell of lilacs floating in through the open windows . . . but in my off-hours, I wandered the streets of Vienna’s first district and planned out the staging of this book with deep pleasure. Thank you so much for giving me that opportunity!