Release(53)

He will find out. Whatever happens next, he will find out. His spirit turns to hers, open and willing to follow wherever she may lead.

“My Queen,” he says. For there she is.





Notes & Acknowledgements


The name Angela Darlington was won at auction to raise money for Diversity Role Models, a charity which tackles homophobia in schools and of which I am a patron. Find out more about their amazing work on www.diversityrolemodels.org. I thank the real Angela Darlington and hasten to add that the resemblance ends at her name. This is a work of fiction. My own father, for example, is not in these pages.


Thanks to my agent and friend Michelle Kass and my editors Denise Johnstone-Burt at Walker and Rosemary Brosnan at HarperCollins for never once baulking at the zigzag sequence of books I keep turning in.


The spirit of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Judy Blume’s Forever suffuse Release. I can only encourage you to read both to see where I’ve fallen short.