My Sister's Bones(98)
‘Tusbih ‘alá khayr, Nidal,’ I whisper as the plane touches down.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following people for their help and encouragement as I wrote My Sister’s Bones:
Katy Loftus at Viking for being such a wonderful and inspiring editor. Your intelligence and insight have truly helped bring My Sister’s Bones to life.
The whole team at Viking Penguin.
My agent Madeleine Milburn for your belief in this novel from the start.
Cara Lee Simpson and all the team at the Madeleine Milburn Literary, TV & Film Agency. You are wonderful people and I really appreciate all your support.
Arts Council England for giving me the time and space to immerse myself in the research for this novel.
Dr Anthony Feinstein (Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto and author of Journalists under Fire: The Psychological Hazards of Covering War). Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions, for shedding light on the impact of trauma on journalists around the world and outlining the stark realities of PTSD.
Hayley Vale for giving me an invaluable insight into the daily life of a forensic psychologist.
Mark Starbuck for your brilliant design work on the booklet as I documented the research phase of the novel.
Rowan Coleman, Carolyn Jess-Cooke and Cally Taylor for your words of encouragement when I needed it most. You are wonderful writers and I admire you all so much.
My family and friends. Thank you Fiona, Adam, Daniel and all my nieces and nephews for your love and encouragement.
My sister, Siobhan Kerr. Thank you for sharing your experiences of life as a journalist, the highs and lows, the procedures, the spine-tingling feeling when a story is unfolding. I will never forget election night 1997 when I came to sit with you in the newsroom and watched history being made as the new government swept to victory. I knew then why you loved the job so much and you inspired Kate Rafter in lots of ways.
Mam. You’re my best friend and I couldn’t do any of this without you. Thank you for listening to lengthy, unedited chapters over the phone and crying at the sad bits!
Dad: a brilliant journalist with a command of language I can only aspire to. Quite simply, you’re my hero and this book would not exist without you. ‘Words have value,’ you once told me. ‘Do them justice.’ I hope I have.
Luke. My beautiful, big-hearted boy. You inspire and delight me on a daily basis. Thank you for giving me the strength to write this novel. Everything I do is for you.
Nick. Thank you for bringing the story of My Sister’s Bones to life with your beautiful reportage drawings as part of the research process and for cheering me on to the end. The stories you shared of life in a refugee camp in Calais will stay with me for ever and I am so proud of the work you do.
To the memory of Marie Colvin, a fearless and gifted journalist who always sought the human story within the chaos of war and whose bravery inspired this novel.
Finally, though the character of Nidal is fictional there are many, many children like him currently trapped and suffering in conflict zones around the world. If this novel does anything I hope that it highlights, in some small way, the pressing need to do what we can to help them and, to paraphrase the legendary war reporter Martha Gellhorn, ‘to make an angry sound against injustice’.