The Hummingbird and the Bear
Page 23
Where the novel heads south of the border I owe a muchas gracias to Christine Scott and David Maung for help with language and location, as well as to John Need for sharing his tales of rattling bus rides across the Mexican countryside.
A hearty thank you also for the feedback and encouragement from readers of earlier drafts: Nick Brown, Wes Brown, Amanda Elend, Valeria Melchioretto, Wayne Milstead, Barrie Sherwood and Daniel Warriner. Your critique was always welcomed, and key to the polishing of script and story. Metaphors on mortgage selling akin to drug pushing must be attributed to the Graham Rayman article, ‘Wall Street Walkers’ in the 5 November 2008 Village Voice. The scenes of swimming seahorses to the aquarium of J. T. Boehm, and escapades in the Cotswolds to Jonathan Gibbard. For his continued dedication to my website I am very lucky to have the talents of David Cook. And I must also acknowledge the exemplary institutions of both the British Library in London and the New York Public Library in Manhattan, for providing the facilities and calm to write a novel when certain bars in Brooklyn, or the cafe in Foyles bookshop, were either busy, closed, or sick of me taking up their space writing.
I am especially indebted to those who shared personal stories and private histories that might have been painful to revisit, and hope I have been faithful to the essence of their original telling.
And finally, not forgetting a special thanks to Salena Godden for wearing a yellow dress in a sunlit field, the spark to a flame, a novel.
About the Author
Nicholas Hogg was born in Leicester in 1974. After graduating from the University of East London with a psychology degree, he travelled widely, living in Japan, Fiji and the United States. He won the 2005 New Writing Ventures award for fiction and was a prizewinner in the London Writers contest. His first novel, Show Me the Sky, was published in 2008. He is currently in Asia working on his third novel.
Copyright
Constable & Robinson Ltd
3 The Lanchesters
162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER
www.constablerobinson.com
First published in the UK by Corsair, an imprint of Constable & Robinson, 2011
Copyright © Nicholas Hogg 2011
The right of Nicholas Hogg to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988
Excerpt from The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje © 1992. Reprinted by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978–1–84901–729–9