Tomorrow

  I meant this to be a gentle tease about her self-confessed scattiness, but I can tell straight away that I’ve offended her. ‘You know I don’t forget things like that,’ she says a little stiffly. ‘Now, is there anything else you need before I go?’

  ‘No, that’ll do. I’m starting to feel sleepy already.’

  ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Sleep well then, Katerina, and I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This book began during the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, after a long period of not writing at all. I said to my wife Maggie one evening, ‘Enough prevarication; tomorrow I’m going to begin my novel,’ and she observed that ‘Tomorrow I’m going to begin my novel’ wouldn’t be a bad opening line. I took her advice, sat down to write the next day with no particular plan, and completed the whole first draft in six weeks. So that is yet another thing for which I must be grateful to Maggie. There are so many. I am so very lucky to be with her.

  A first draft is one thing, a finished book is another. I’m not sure if many readers understand how important the role of the editor is in steering a book from its raw beginnings to its final form. Editing someone else’s book is a difficult and subtle art. I’ve been very lucky with all the editors who have worked with me, and my new editor for this book, Sarah Hodgson, is no exception. She’s been great.

  The copy editor also plays an underrated role in making a writer’s prose look smoother and more accomplished than it otherwise would, and I am very grateful to Alison Tulett for once again undertaking this task.

  I would also like to thank my friend Sarah Brown who read the first draft and gave me very helpful feedback. Sarah is writing a book about Shakespeare and science fiction. It’s quite a feat, and I recommend it.

  Many thanks, too, to my fellow Corvus authors, Liz Gifford, Kate London and Vanessa Tait, who read what I’d written in the first week, and encouraged me to carry on.

  Finally, I’d like to give my special thanks to Richard Evans, not only for the cover design of this book, but for all the current covers of my Corvus novels. I really love what he’s done for them.

  The painting of the Last Supper hangs, in the real world, in the church of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, just across the water from the Doge’s palace, and was made by Tintoretto in the final decade of the sixteenth century. There is an excellent reproduction of it on Wikipedia and it’s well worth looking at. (Make the image as big as you can on your screen: there’s so much going on in it.) I’m not sure I’ve ever come across a painting that had such an impact on me.