Fanatics (30 page)

I left the house and returned to the shop. On the bench, awaiting assembly, were the cherrywood pieces I had fabricated to make a cradle. I put on my apron and went to work.

Fanatics
is a work of fiction. Except those noted below, all happenings and characters are imaginary.

The events in the life of Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498), as described in
Fanatics
, conform to the historical record. The manner of his death follows eyewitness accounts.

The “Severn Eleven” incident is very loosely based on the activities of the actual “Toronto 18,” who trained in a rural area near Orillia, Ontario, planned several terrorist attacks in the Toronto area, and were arrested in June 2006 and charged with various crimes under the Anti-Terrorism Act. As of this writing, a number have been convicted.

I found the following books useful in my research:

Seward, D.
The Burning of the Vanities: Savonarola and the Borgia Pope
. Sutton Publishing, 2006.

Martines, L.
Fire in the City: Savonarola and the Struggle for the Soul of Renaissance Florence
. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

I would like to thank my publisher, Kristin Cochrane; my editor, Amy Black, for her customary support and insight; and Janice Weaver, for a painstaking copy edit.

I am grateful to my children, Dylan, Megan, and Brendan Bell, for reading the manuscript and offering feedback; and especially to Ting-xing Ye for editorial help and, more, for the kind of faith and encouragement that every writer needs.