Tahmima Anam: The Bones of Grace

I am grateful to The Society of Authors, who awarded me a travelling scholarship which enabled me to visit the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology in the summer of 2015. Many thanks to Jessica Cundiff for a tour of the collection, including the Agassiz shelves, Kronosaurus , and Stephen Jay Gould’s writing desk. Thanks to Alice Albinia for introducing me to Usman Qazi, who gave me invaluable feedback on the chapters set in the Suleiman. Mizan Uncle and Jamboo Khan were excellent hosts in Chittagong and Shithakunda, and I thank them for their gracious hospitality. Rezwana Chowdhury and her team at BELA work tirelessly for the rights of workers on the shipbreaking beaches, and I offer them my respect and admiration. Although we have not had an opportunity to meet in person, Phillip D. Gingerich and Johannes Thewissen’s work on Ambulocetus has served as a great inspiration. Any mistakes or omissions are of course entirely my own.

My personal debts are many. Thank you, first and foremost, to my publishers, Terry Karten and Jamie Byng, who have brought to this book the kind of optimism and enthusiasm a writer can only dream of. Thank you to all my wonderful collaborators at Canongate, HarperCollins, and Penguin Random House India, all of whom have committed heroics at various stages of the process — Louisa Joyner, Meru Gokhale, Jane Beirn, Jenny Fry, Lorraine McCann, Natasha Hodgson, Jaz Lacey-Campbell, and Vicki Rutherford. Thank you to Sarah Chalfant, who is a friend to my intellect, my heart, and my spirit. Thank you to my friends at the Wylie Agency — Andrew Wylie, Alba-Ziegler Bailey, Jin Auh, Jackie Ko, and Charles Buchan. I thank Anya Serota, who has seen me through a decade of writing life and so much more. Thank you to Abrar Athar and Medium Rare for translating my ‘girl on the beach’ idea into reality. Thank you to Joe Treasure, who patiently read endless drafts of this novel. Thank you to Peter Florence for coming to Dhaka and for all the dreaming that followed. I thank Tash Aw, Michael Puett, and the inimitable John Freeman for their friendship and inspiration. Thank you to Auntie Lona for the precious gift of writing time. To the extended ROLI family, especially Matt Carney, Corey Harrower, Kate Enright, Nataleigh Strasburg, Jean-Baptiste Theibault, and Charles Cook, thank you for making this small corner of London feel like home.

I thank the sisterhood for holding my hand through illness, the bruise of early motherhood, and eventual re-emergence into life, reading, and this book: Bee Rowlatt, Kamila Shamsie, Rachel Holmes, Leesa Gazi, Sohini Alam, Sawsan Eskander, and Eeshita Azad. Thanks to my sister Shaveena, who, by telling a small lie many years ago, accidentally gave me the idea for this novel. Thank you to my grandmother, Musleha Islam, who, with her indomitable spirit, is the muse for this entire endeavour. Thank you to my parents for their love, and for embodying these words by the great Rabindranath Tagore: ‘Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high/Into that heaven of freedom, My Father, let my country awake.’

And finally, boundless gratitude to my partner Roland Lamb: we are twelve years, three books, a baby, a company, and several continents later, yet you are still my romantic hero on and off the page. And to Rumi, who has just begun to discover the magic of words, I thank you for filling every day with grace, love, and laughter.