The Sisters Mao

by Gavin McCrea

  The Sing-Song Tribunal is invented; all the other plays mentioned in the novel are pre-existing works. Chapters xvii and xviii contain quotations from August Strindberg’s Miss Julie; all are from Michael Meyer’s translation, though I have made some changes to Meyer’s language to bring it closer in tone to the novel. The lines of poetry quoted in chapter xiii are my version of a translation by Maoist Documentation Project of Mao Zedong’s poem ‘The Immortals’ (1957). The quotation from I Ching is a slight adaptation of a section from the Penguin edition (1989).

  Acknowledgements

  I am grateful to Iñaki Moraza, Breda McCrea, Niamh McCrea, Eugene Langan, Barbara Ebert, Priscilla Morris, Seonaid Mackay, and Andrea Pontiroli for their love and support; to my agent Rebecca Carter for her continued tending and rearing; to my editors Philip Gwyn Jones and Molly Slight for their insights and advice; and to the entire Scribe team, especially Sarah Braybrooke and Adam Howard in the UK, Henry Rosenbloom and Kevin O’Brien in Australia, and Emily Saer Cook in the United States, for their work in producing and promoting this book.

  A bursary from An Chomhairle Ealaíon (Irish Arts Council) funded ten months of uninterrupted writing. My thanks to Sarah Bannan and the literature team at the Council for this help.