Acknowledgements

Thank you to everyone at Firefly, especially to Janet Thomas and Rebecca F. John, my hawk-eyed and thoughtful editors, Amy Low for their brilliant and supportive marketing work and illustrator Laura Borio and designer Becka Moor for this wonderful cover. Thank you to my lovely agent Abi Sparrow for championing my stories.

This book first began to take shape on the MA in Writing for Young People course at Bath Spa University in 2015-16, and I’d like to thank everyone on that course, tutors and students alike, for their support, insight and enthusiasm. I am so lucky to have found such a wonderful writing community. Thanks especially to Elen Caldecott, who supervised the first version of this story during the MA, when it was a very different tale but with similar bones! When I began the story all over again, the encouragement and perceptive critiques of Catherine, Julia and Kat during our video-call writing workshops helped so much.

Thank you, Jane, for helping me with my Welsh, and for coming up with some truly beautiful language choices. Thank you, Ola, for your invaluable assistance with the Polish elements in the story. And thank you to my ever-supportive family and friends, and to all the readers who have read drafts of my stories over the years and encouraged me to keep at it.