- Sep 15
I recently read the novel Racing the Moon, written by Terry Prone, and I was surprised that it mentions indexes.
Racing the Moon is the coming-of-age story of fraternal twin sisters, Darcy and Sophia, in Dublin from the 1980s to the 1990s. It begins with an accident at their fourth birthday and follows their life through school and adulthood. Most of the book is written in the third person and the rest is written via letters and later emails showing the development of technology in the 1990s.
The blurb on the cover describes the sisters as:
Darcy and Sophia. Twin sisters. Complete opposites. Sophia: beautiful, successful and a keeper of secrets. Darcy: fat, red-haired - and always meeting trouble halfway. Racing the Moon is their story: the story of a generation moving from a cautious convent background to international careers and contact through the Internet.
On page 97, Sophia and her mother are discussing the quote “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…” and wondering where it comes from. Sophia’s mother thinks it is from a Scottish play, and that the dictionary of quotations will have it. Sophia finds the dictionary, looks up the index and finds the whole quotation. Interestingly, the whole quotation is printed but not the name of the Scottish play, ‘Macbeth’.
For anyone writing a book which needs a proofread or an index, hire a professional from AFEPI (Association of Freelance Editors, Proofreaders & Indexers of Ireland) , the Society of Indexers, or CIEP (Charter Institute of Editing and Proofreading) to lighten your load!
Sister by Kjell Ola Dahl, translated from Norwegian into English by Don Bartlett, is a book I read recently that mentions indexes.
Sister is part of the Oslo detectives series and focuses on the detective Frank Frølich. He was suspended from police duty and is working as a private investigator. He is approached by his girlfriend’s colleague to help find the sister of a female asylum seeker. The asylum seeker wants to find her sister to avoid being deported by the authorities because she is afraid she will be murdered if she returns to her home country. Frølich finds the sister who denies having a sibling and things get complicated for Frølich. The police issue threats to Frølich to drop the case. There are a few murders and adventures along the way before Frølich solves the case.
The book mentions indexes when Frølich is looking up “the document index in the memory stick and studied the dating of the files more thoroughly”.
Strictly speaking, I would call it a directory or list of files, not “index”. Perhaps the term "index" is used when translating Norwegian into English. Therefore, I include the mention here to show how broad the understanding of the terms "index" covers.
For anyone writing a book which needs a proofread or an index, hire a professional from AFEPI (Association of Freelance Editors, Proofreaders & Indexers of Ireland) , the Society of Indexers, or CIEP (Charter Institute of Editing and Proofreading) to lighten your load!
As an indexer I notice when indexing is mentioned in novels and I was delighted to see an indexer mentioned in the Acknowledgements of a cook book.
Indexers do not usually get named or thanked in book acknowledgements unlike the editors, proofreaders and illustrators. Indexers are an anonymous lot. Indexes tend to be taken for granted and readers rarely consider who creates the index.
I recently bought Sizzle and Drizzle, a baking book, by Nancy Birtwhistle. Nancy is from Hull in England and won the Great British Bake Off in 2014. Sizzle and Drizzle was first published in 2020 and republished in 2024. It contains recipes for biscuits and scones; bread; cakes; free from; pastry and puddings & desserts. Most recipes have QR codes linked to videos which take you to her website.
In Sizzle and Drizzle, the Acknowledgements are at the back of the book before the index. In the Acknowledgements Nancy thanks “…Curtis Duffett, a super-kind follower of mine in the US, who created the index for my self-published, original edition of ‘Sizzle and Drizzle’”. Curtis Duffett indexed the first edition which Nancy self-published. The edition I have has been re-indexed and it is an excellent index.
Other books written by Nancy include Clean and Green, Green Living Made Easy, The Green Gardening Handbook and The Green Budget Guide.
For anyone writing a book which needs a proofread or an index, hire a professional from AFEPI (Association of Freelance Editors, Proofreaders & Indexers of Ireland) , the Society of Indexers, or CIEP (Charter Institute of Editing and Proofreading) to lighten your load!