Meatspace (33 page)

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Authors: Nikesh Shukla

BOOK: Meatspace

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‘Diving for dear life

When we could be diving for pearls.’

Some memories will for ever be 3-dimensional.

Aziz vs the True Death

Acknowledgements:

ābhāra #1: wife Katie for the ‘two brain’ theory, for making me laugh more than anyone and for teddy dog.

ābhāra #2: my agent Jamie Coleman from Greene & Heaton, for being a hard taskmaster, good egg, giver of notes, calming navigator and curer of ‘Second Novel Syndrome’.

ābhāra #3: Scott Pack, Rachel Faulkner, Cicely Aspinall and everyone at The Friday Project for making the book possible and for letting us send some meat into space.

ābhāra #4: Nick Dogg, the Sophisticated Party Robot for designing the book cover, spending dedicated hours cutting up small pieces of meat and creating something so disgusting and beautiful and fitting and for making the lapsed vegetarian in me feel sad. Chris Lawson for the photography.

ābhāra #5: first reader James Smythe for telling me it was okay; Gavin and everyone at Quartet Books for unending support; Vanessa Pelz-Sharpe and Mark Bray for instructing me on tattoos; my uncle Mukesh and my dad Jitu who unwittingly provide me with a lot of material; Josie Long, for giving me The Golden Game, and for once doing a project called 100 Days to Make Me a Better Person, where some of the writing I did seeded ideas for characters in this book; Riz Ahmed for asking me about my line between fiction and non-fiction; Georgina Ruffhead and Gemma Addy from David Higham Associates; my honey Sathnam, for the walk and the ice-cream; Katherine Woodfine, Hannah Davies, Anna McKerrow and Will White for WriBooWiBoo.

ābhāra #6: Gautam Malkani, Teju Cole, Nerm Chauhan, Kunal Anand, Suze Azzopardi, Niven Govinden, Stuart Evers, Lee Rourke, Anjali Bhatia, Katherine Solomon, Chimène Suleyman, Rupa Bhatti, Joe Pickering, Krupa and Leena Shukla, Salena Godden, Lucy MacNab, Alan and Mary, Anita Rani, Evie Wyld, Mimi and Bobby Etherington, and Rukhsana Yasmin for various words and acts of kindness and support over the years.

And, finally, an ābhāra to Rob Lingham for that night in the pub when we found your internet doppelganger, The Boy with the Bow Tie Tattoo.

Shout out Arts Emergency and Roy Castle Lung Cancer Foundation.

The writing of this book was supported in part by Arts Council England and the Authors’ Foundation.

The Friday Project

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This ebook first published in Great Britain by HarperCollins
Publishers
Ltd 2014

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Publishers
Ltd 2014

Nikesh Shukla asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

FIRST EDITION

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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, downloaded, 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: 9780007565078

Ebook Edition © June 2014 ISBN: 9780007565085

Version: [2014-06-18]

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