You can put the pen down now...

A Prisoner of Birth has been sent to the line editor - she who picks up tiny mistakes. For example, on page 111 the judge asks one of the witnesses how many years he's lived in a particular house and he says 7, but 400 pages later, a date proves he only lived there only 6 - so she asks me which I want to change, 7 to 6, or the date. It takes a particularly strange and wonderful mind to spot these things. I signed off on the manuscript at 11.32 on Friday morning, and as the book has been sent back to Macmillan and on to the US, I am in no position to change one word, so it's finally out of my hands. Publication date is March 4th for the USA and March 7th for the UK. I notice that amazon are already taking pre-orders.