Just Between Us (61 page)

Huge thanks to Ali Gunn at Curtis Brown for endless support and cheering phone calls, also thanks to Carol Jackson and all at CB.

Special thanks and flowers have to go to Rachel Hore, Jennifer Parr and Lynne Drew at HarperCollins, without whom this book would be a pamphlet (although probably easier to read in bed). Thank you all for doing so much for me and for making it such fun. Thanks to the entire team at HarperCollins, who are friends as well as colleagues, starting with dear Moira Reilly and Tony Purdue, the Irish A-team. Thanks to Nick Sayers, Amanda Ridout, Fiona McIntosh, Maxine Hitchcock, Martin Palmer, Jane Harris, John Bond, Victoria Barnsley, Esther Taylor, Venetia Butterfield, Sara Wikner, Anne O’Brien, Lee Motley, Phyllis Acolatse, Mike McQueen, Steve Newell and all the HC team.

Thanks to everyone at HarperCollins Australia for being so wonderful (and letting me in on the yoga class). Thanks to lovely Karen-Maree Griffiths and Louisa Dear for taking care of me, thanks to Christine Farmer, Jim Demetriou, David Lange, Arthur Cavalliotis, John Wilkinson, Michael Mousallem and every one of the team who made me so utterly welcome.

In New York, thanks to Deborah Schneider, also big thanks to my Dutton and Plume family in the US: Carole Baron, Laurie Chittenden, Stephanie Bowe, Lisa Johnson, Brant Janeway and Sarah Melnyk.

Thanks to Joanne, Esther, Larissa, Yvonne, Moria and all my dear ex-colleagues who can never remember any decent
gossip when I phone up. Thanks to the wonderful writing sisterhood that includes Martina Devlin, Jane Moore, Colette Caddle, Susan Lewis, Jenny Colgan, and all my writer friends, especially the girls at the RNA who write such wonderful books.

Last but certainly not least, there are two important groups of people to thank: all the lovely booksellers who sell my books and all the marvellous people all over the world who buy them. Thank you.

Finally, Ireland has lots of glorious places with gloriously Irish names, names that probably sound mad to other people but absolutely normal to us. Due to my constant fear of creating characters who coincidentally happen to have the same names as real people who live in the same place as in my book, I like to make up place names. I wrongly thought I’d made up the name Kinvara (don’t ask me how) until I was in the supermarket and saw smoked salmon from a real place called Kinvara. Eeek.

And just in case, I asked people did they know of any other Kinvaras.

‘Ah, sure there’s loads of them,’ I was told.

Double eek. Anyway, my Kinvara is my own invention and to make it different, I called it Kinvarra. And ditto Castletown, which is made up and is not one of the scores of Castletowns dotted around the place. Place names aside, I hope you enjoy
Just Between Us.

Cathy Kelly is a number one bestselling author. She worked as a journalist before becoming a novelist, and has published ten novels. She is an Ambassador for Unicef in Ireland, helping to raise awareness of the plight of 12 million children orphaned across Africa through AIDS. She lives in Wicklow with her family.

For more information on Cathy Kelly, visit her website at www.cathykelly.com

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