I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the BC Arts Council.

In Sandakan, Tawau, Singapore, and Melbourne, I was able to interview many people who shared their stories with me. I thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for your generosity and trust. To my parents, and to my extended family in Canada, Malaysia, Australia, China, the United States and the Netherlands, all my gratitude and love.

Although aspects of this novel – the Japanese Occupation of British North Borneo, the Sandakan Death Marches, and the events leading to the fall of Sukarno in Indonesia in 1965 – are based on the historical record, the characters in this novel are fictional creations. The geography of Sandakan town has been slightly altered for the sake of simplicity.

William Sullivan’s diary is inspired by the story of Donald Hill, an RAF pilot stationed in Hong Kong who was taken prisoner by the Japanese Army in 1941. For those wishing to know more, the story is beautifully told by Andro Linklater in his book The Code of Love (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000).

For their unwavering support, I am deeply grateful to Asya Muchnick at Little, Brown, and to Marilyn Biderman, Anita Chong, and all those at McClelland & Stewart with whom I have had the pleasure to work. My heartfelt thanks to Alex Schultz for his fine work copyediting this novel. To my editor, Ellen Seligman: I am fortunate indeed, and so grateful to her for sharing this journey with me. My thanks for her faith in this book, and for her wisdom and guidance in helping me to get the words right.

Jane Eaton Hamilton, Joy Masuhara, and Steven Dang generously shared their insights and answered my many and diffuse questions, as did Jeroen Kemperman at the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation. My thanks and great admiration to Don Mowatt, for opening my eyes to the world of radio. To Amanda Okopski and Dean Bakopoulos, my dear ones, unstinting in their love, generous in their joy, I am blessed by our friendship. And to Willem, my anchor and my love.

To Carol Hudgins, Cynthia Leung, and to my mother, Matilda Thien: no words can express how I miss you.

The epigraph from The Needs of Strangers by Michael Ignatieff, copyright © 1985 by Michael Ignatieff. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

The quotation about the origins of empathy is from Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene (London: Oxford University Press, 1976).

Gail’s description of radio signals is paraphrased from Thomas Looker’s The Sound and the Story: NPR and the Art of Radio (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995).

The newspaper quotation on page 117 is from the article “Shortest time interval measured.” BBC News, February 25, 2004. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/ nature/3486160.stm.

The words heard on the radio on page 256 and spoken by the man on the street on page 266 are from Maslyn Williams’s Five Journeys from Jakarta: Inside Sukarno’s Indonesia. Copyright © 1966 by Maslyn Williams. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers/William Morrow.

The quotation on page 290 is from Siegfried Sassoon’s poem “Memory.”

About the Author

Madeleine Thien’s first work of fiction, Simple Recipes, a collection of stories published when she was twenty-six, won four awards in Canada,was a finalist of a regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book, and was named a notable book by the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize. Certainty is her first novel.

Originally from Vancouver, Madeleine Thien currently lives in Quebec City with her husband,Willem.