Author’s Note
This book began life as a conversation in the pub with my brother Nigel. He was telling me he’d just bought a book about the Olympic. ‘Titanic’s sister ship,’ he explained. ‘Actually there were three sisters – Olympic, Titanic, and Britannic.’ He went on to tell me that the Britannic had been used as a hospital ship in the First World War and had hit a German mine. But it was those words, ‘three sisters’ that had sparked my imagination – three ships, three girls, two shipwrecks … I knew from that moment on that I would write a book from this idea.
Almost as soon as I began researching, I came across Violet Jessop, whose memoirs were posthumously published as Titanic Survivor, edited by John Maxtone-Graham. She did indeed serve on all three ships, as described in this novel, and her memoirs were invaluable to me. While my sisters are of course fictitious, almost everything Violet does was taken from her book. I decided to put my girls on the same lifeboats as Violet for both of the shipwrecks. The details of Violet holding an unknown baby on the Titanic lifeboat, and the disaster with the lifeboats on the Britannic are all real events, as is her tending to an injured sailor on the Greek island of Kea and telling him he wouldn’t die because she’d been praying for him. (He did indeed survive, and Violet met him again in Italy on her journey back home.)
My own experiences of cruise ships are sadly very limited to date. As a child I grew up within sight of Southampton Water, and often stood at the end of our road to watch the QE2 go out. Her foghorns, often sounded on leaving port, would sometimes wake me up. For my fortieth birthday, my husband booked me a surprise weekend cruise on the P&O ship, Aurora. We only sailed from Southampton over to Zeebrugge and back but it was glorious. In researching a suitable short cruise for Harriet and Sheila, that had to start from Southampton, I came across the one on the QM2 that they take, and now it’s on my bucket list to do that.
I wrote this novel during the 2020 pandemic, working from my home in Bournemouth. The cruise industry was hit very hard, and several ships were anchored in Bournemouth bay for the duration. They came and went, but Aurora was there much of the time, and the QM2 paid us a few visits too. Between writing this novel and ship-spotting from our local cliff top, I turned into a bit of a ship-nerd. I blame my brother – he kicked all this off with his talk of sister ships!
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to my editors Abigail Fenton and Dushi Horti for their invaluable help with this novel. Thanks also to my brother Nigel Thompson, who loaned me a pile of fascinating books about Olympic and Titanic, as well as providing the initial spark that started me off on this story.
Thanks to my son Connor who listened to me talking through my plot ideas, and who came up with the idea for one of the twists. I hope I’ve written it the way you thought it would work – you will need to read it to see!
As always, thanks to my son Fionn and husband Ignatius for being beta readers and providing me with some early feedback.
Thank you to all at HQ – copy editors, proof readers, cover designers – all do a superb job bringing my books to market. And thanks to the readers who keep buying them!
Last but by no means least, huge thanks are due to my friend Lor Bingham, who also acted as a beta reader for this book. Your detailed notes and comments, especially regarding the cancer storyline, were an enormous help. I hope I have got these sensitive sections right.
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