THIS NOVEL BEGAN when I read Alexis de Tocqueville's prescient Democracy in America. In the following three years I was nourished by a hundred other works, most notably George Wilson Pierson's Tocqueville in America, Andre Jardin's Tocqueville, and Hugh Brogan's delightful Alexis de Tocqueville, which was published just in the nick of time. The author's debt to Tocqueville himself will be obvious to scholars who will detect, squirreled away among the thatch of sentences, distinctive threads, necklaces of words that were clearly made by the great man himself. The very fanciful use I have made of these artifacts may not suit everyone, but as the world of Tocqueville seems to be filled with dissenting voices, it may not be inappropriate for a novelist to assume a minor place in the back row of that full-throated choir.

Naturally I read a great deal other than Tocqueville, and there are some who have recommended that I provide a bibliography, an instrument that seems as useful to the reader of a novel as a hammer is to a dolphin. Nonetheless I have posted a list of those books I remember reading while I worked. This is on my Web site at www.petercareybooks.com.

Finally, it is a pleasure to thank Frances Coady, Sonny Mehta, Ben Ball, Angus Cargill, Diana Coglianese, Meredith Rose, Lydia Buechler, Jean Marc Devocelle, Gabriel Packard, Vanessa Manko, Francoise Mouly, Ivan and Claude Nabokov, Lucy Neave, Ruth Scurr, Paul Kane, Patrick McGrath and Maria Aiken, Stewart Waltzer, Mike Wallace, David Rankin, Grant Hamston at the State Library of Victoria, and David Smith at the New York Public Library.

Peter Carey received the Booker Prize for Oscar and Lucinda and again for True History of the Kelly Gang. His other honors include the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Born in Australia, he has lived in New York City for twenty years, where he is now the executive director of the Hunter College MFA program in creative writing.