Copyright

      William Collins

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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       www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com

      This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

      Copyright © Alec Ryrie 2019

      Cover design by Jack Smyth

      Cover images © Shutterstock

      Alec Ryrie asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

      Source ISBN: 9780008299811

      Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008299835

      Version: 2019-09-23

       Dedication

      for Victoria, my believer

       Epigraph

      ‘Most of us, I suspect … make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense.’

      Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending