For all the talk about writing being a solitary endeavor, I was hardly lonely while writing this novel. I had a lot of help.
For assistance in my research, I am indebted to Professor Sara Dickinson, Università degli Studi di Genova; Sister Ioanna of St. Innocent Religious Community in Minnesota; Professor Derek Offord, University of Bristol; and Professor Christine Worobec, Northern Illinois University. For the gift of their perceptive early reads, I am grateful to Lynne Barrett, Debra McLane, and especially to my dear friend Kyra Petrovskaya Wayne for her help with all things Russian. What errors and infelicities remain are mine alone.
I am beholden to Claire Wachtel, a truth teller, for insisting that it must be better and then waiting another year while it got that way; and to the rest of the folks at HarperCollins who have turned a bunch of bytes into an objet d’art and then sent it out into the world. My thanks to Marly Rusoff and Michael Radulesçu for their friendship and wise counsel; I am just so lucky to know such mensches. That goes for Rachelle and Mitchell Kaplan; Kimberly and Les Standiford; Ellen Kanner and Benjamin Bohlmann; Michael and Paula Gillespie; and James W. Hall and the Lady Evelyn: our lives here in Miami would be a bust without them.
Everything I write is read first by my husband and in-house editor, Clifford Paul Fetters, and then improved immeasurably by his insights. There are not words enough to thank him for his patience and his commitment to what we do.
And lastly, in loving remembrance of my dear spaniel, Leo, a wise and holy fool in his own way. The muse lying under my desk during the writing of this book, he died peacefully the night before I sent out the completed manuscript.