It will be evident that I owe boundless gratitude to those named within this book, my family and families. There are others without whom my life is hard to imagine and whom I would like to thank. They are Clare Alexander, Dan Franklin, Hannah Ross, John and Marion Bailey, Julian Barnes, Edward Behrens, Rupert Christiansen, Jamie Fergusson, Joe and Helen Fernandez, Flora Fraser, the late Anthea Gibson and all her family, Marianne Hinton, Arthur Hobhouse, Niall Hobhouse, Alan Hollinghurst, Flora Joll, Amanda Mackenzie Stuart, Sophie-Caroline de Margerie, Adam Mars-Jones, Trevor Messenger, Peter Parker, Frances Powell, Michael Sandberg, Nicola Shulman, Liv Stones and Ellis Woodman. They have, with my family and others named in the book or sealed in my heart, been my eyes at the worst of it and my connection to life at the best of it.

Now that I’ve had the good fortune to arrive in the United States in paper-and-thought form (possibly more actual than my flesh-and-blood self), I would like to thank Jennifer Barth and Jason Sack at HarperCollins for their response, their detailed grip, their openness to jokes, and their scrupulousness. That they judged that certain forms of repeated pain might not entertainingly be inflicted on their/my American readership and made their own surgeries is a matter for which you the reader may well wish to thank them also.

To the place and the people of the island of Colonsay, it is to a degree my life I owe as well as my love. I opened my eyes upon Scotland and it is upon Scotland that I hope to close them.

Alexander Foss has the burden of my articulated admiration to bear, a paper umbrella where he, a fencer, might have preferred a swordstick. He turns away from it, fearing hubris. He read this book in anticipation of finding in it the words of Milton upon his deceased wife, with which I shall cut its last tether to me, the words that cut to the quick, and to the dead:

‘I wak’d, she fled, and day brought back my night.’

Candia McWilliam was born in Edinburgh. She is the author of A Case of Knives (1988), which won a Betty Trask Prize; A Little Stranger (1989); Debatable Land (1994), which was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize and the Premio Grinzane Cavour in its Italian translation for the best foreign novel of the year; and a collection of stories, Wait Till I Tell You (1997). In 2006 she began to suffer from the effects of blepharospasm and became functionally blind as a result. In 2009 she underwent an operation to partially reverse the condition. What to Look for in Winter won the South Bank Sky Arts Award for literature, the Spear’s Book Award for memoir, the Hawthornden Prize, and was shortlisted for the Mind Book of the Year Award and the Duff Cooper Prize.