My agent, Oli Munson of Blake Friedmann, has championed the book from the very outset – from larval caterpillar, through pupal, to fully-fledged butterfly. Writing and researching a book such as this can be a dauntingly solitary experience, so one is all the more grateful when anybody outside one’s own immediate family takes an interest in it. No definite proof of the existence of the Corpus Maleficus has been found to date. I have merely concatenated the customs of a number of different tribes into one, for reasons of fictional convenience.

The gypsy lore, language, customs, names, habits and myths depicted in the book are all accurate. Madeleine, with the stipulation that ‘no one but her may look at or see those things which he has placed inside the coffers’. I concentrate particularly on the codicil to the Will in which Nostradamus bequeaths two secret coffers to his eldest daughter. The Will that I have used in the book is Nostradamus’s original last Will and Testament (in the original French, with my translation appended). The remaining fifty-eight quatrains are missing, and, to this day, they have never been found. Nostradamus did indeed only complete 942 quatrains out of 1000, representing his intended total of ten centuries of 100 quatrains apiece. ‘Perhaps proof of how aleatory the concept of nationality is lies in the fact that we must learn it before we can recognize it as such.’ From A Reading Diary by Alberto Manguel 26, Reflections and Remarks on Human Life, s.4 ‘Our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail, in good spirits.’ Robert Louis Stevenson, Complete Works, vol.

‘As it had never occurred to him to leave word behind, he was mourned over for dead till, after eight months, his first letter arrived from Talcahuano.’ From Typhoon by Joseph Conrad The Nostradamus Prophecies M A RI O RE A D I N G

Download mate mario