Some people never read forewords, or read them only after they’ve finished the book, in case the introduction spoils the story. Other people value suspense so little, or fear nasty surprises so much, that they flip straight to the last page of a book and check how it ends. I can only presume that very few readers of my novel The Crimson Petal and the White flipped straight to the final page, because so many of them let me know how bereft they felt when they got there.

The Crimson Petal was, and is, an 835-page tale set in 1870s London. It follows the progress of a young woman called Sugar, a prostitute who longs to escape the influence of her abusive mother. By the end of the book, she is working as a nanny and has formed a close bond with a little girl called Sophie. There is every reason to hope that Sugar, damaged though she undoubtedly is by her past, will not perpetuate the cycle of abuse. But hope is not the same thing as knowing for sure. At the very end, Sugar and Sophie are forced onto the streets. What happens next is undisclosed.

A few days ago, I lugged out the cardboard box where I keep letters from my readers. I re-read the ones about The Crimson Petal. Most of them were wonderfully generous and enthusiastic; several of them were from people who’d been readers for decades and had never written to an author before.

Here are some of the things I found:

Ever since I was a child in Cape Bruton, Nova Scotia, I have loved to read. There are some books which illuminate why that is, and remind a person how thankful we should be for those who write. The Crimson Petal and the White moved me so deeply, and taught me so much, in the process of a wonderful escape into another time . . . I wish I could articulate more lucidly all that your work made me think about and feel. Thank you for your gift.

This lady was unusual in not demanding to be told what happened after the ending of the novel. Most people who wrote to me were not so serene. Quite a few described themselves as ‘in shock’ or ‘desperate’. A lady in New York began her letter:

How dare you, sir? What an ending!

A man in Arnhem, The Netherlands, anticipated my position as he made his pitch:

It is very clear why the story ends where it ends. You have made your point . . . Still I would like to request a sequel, for the following reasons:

I have grown attached to Sugar, your and my heroine. In my own real life there have been a number of sudden and irrevocable goodbyes, which have left lasting feelings of pain and guilt. Why do you make me suffer more?

Another man assured me that:

I could have easily read another 800 pages. So I implore you to please, please, please, PLEASE continue the story in a sequel.

Another man — the author of a tough, gritty contemporary Scottish novel — showed a touching concern for little Sophie:

About the ending; you are writing a sequel, aren’t you? Sophie grows up to be a woman-before-her-time, maybe an author herself?

Another young man, from Texas – also, by remarkable coincidence, a published novelist – showed considerable ambivalence towards my book:

The Crimson Petal and the White is singularly the most frustrating, maddening masterwork that I have ever trudged through in my entire life . . . How dare your book end with us not knowing what happened to Agnes! And where did Sugar take Sophie off to anyhow? Novels aren’t supposed to just stop! Novels aren’t like real life. Novels are supposed to have satisfying tight endings.

More conciliatory was the lady from Bournemouth, Dorset, speaking on behalf of a group of ‘avid readers of mature years’. Her postcard, decorated with pussycats, read:

Thank you so much. However, where did Sugar and Sophie go? Australia? New Zealand? Back north? Please – if you know — give us an idea. We worry about Sophie!

A 65-year-old woman from Quebec was given the book as a Christmas present and initially had her doubts:

I had never heard of you and, at 835 pages, I wondered if I would ever have the courage, and the physical strength to hold the book on my lap. I took it home and read the first line. That’s all it took . . . Just before I end this letter, please tell me: where did Sugar go????? Did she indeed bring the child back to her mother???? What happens to them? You must write a sequel.

A woman from Aurora, Colorado confessed that she had not slept for two days and called in sick for work in order the read the novel in one marathon session:

I simply won’t be able to sleep until I’ve sent this off. About five minutes ago I finished your work The Crimson Petal and the White. I would have been writing five minutes earlier but I was too stunned by your ending…

A lady in Michigan tackled the book in a slightly more leisurely mode:

I’ve spent two weeks entranced by The Crimson Petal and the White with only a few breaks for meals and an occasional tennis or bridge game. And I didn’t think I liked historical novels. After finishing at 1 a.m., I spent the rest of the night wondering what happened to Sugar, Agnes and William, the cad. You can’t leave me hanging; please issue a news bulletin regarding their fates.

A corporate lawyer wrote:

I wonder if you can resolve a dispute as to the interpretation of the ending of your book, I am a member of an all-male book group . . . Everybody but me thought the ending meant that Sugar took Sophie away to meet Agnes and they all lived happily ever after.

I was touched by the goodwill of a man from New York City:

I just now — this second — said goodbye, knowing that it must be so. All week I had to pinch myself as a reminder that my new friends were not forever — but until the end of the week or maybe a little longer. Now they are gone – I hope to greater heights.

Particularly haunting was this hand-written note from a gentleman in Lancashire:

A few days before Christmas I was half awake and the first thought that came to me was what I could obtain as Christmas presents for Miss Sophie, Sugar and Mrs Fox. Then suddenly I realised who they really were.

There were many other people people who communicated with me. Academics, women on welfare, historians, campaigners for social justice. I even corresponded with several prostitutes who announced that they were Sugar and had been spooked by my ability to spy on their thoughts as they were dealing with customers. All in all, my novel had made a powerful impression on an extraordinary range of people. I didn’t send replies to as many as I would have liked, because I grew tired of explaining that there was not going to be a sequel. Sugar had been denied privacy all her life, I would say, and by the end of the novel she has earned the right to make her own way in the world, unscrutinised by us. And isn’t it fun, at the end of the book, to be challenged to do what the Victorians were obliged to do between instalments of serialised novels: construct what happens next in our imaginations? In any case, the ending of The Crimson Petal is not as sudden as it might first appear. Re-read the final chapters, and you will find that there is a gradual process of leave-taking, a drawing of curtains, a succession of narrative farewells to each of the key characters. Yes, their future is uncertain. But so are all our futures. Only death concludes the story, and Sugar and Sophie are still alive. A sequel would crush that life out of them.

So, here I am in 2006, presenting a collection of Crimson Petal stories. Have I changed my mind about the sequels?

No. This is a book of stories about characters who also appeared in The Crimson Petal and the White. You needn’t have read that book in order to appreciate this one. The stories are, as stories should be, little worlds of their own.

They are also a much more wide-ranging time-travel experience than The Crimson Petal was. Some of the characters in these new stories are very much younger than when they were in the novel, some are very much older. One tale is a memoir of the Edwardian era, narrated in the 1990s by the son of on of Petal’s characters — a reminder of how few human lifespans it takes to link us to distant centuries. Yet the essential mysteries at the end of The Crimson Petal (What happened to Sugar? Where did she and Sophie go?) are left intact.

Inevitably, though, the three stories that are set after the end of Petal — ‘Clara and the Rat Man’, ‘Medicine’ and ‘A Mighty Horde Of Women In Very Big Hats, Advancing’ — offer glimpses of futures that may be different from the scenarios some readers imagined. Fro example, those folk who were convinced that Sugar must have been captured immediately after the end of the novel will have to concede that, as far as can be judged from these new tales, no such capture occurred. But we are still a very long way from knowing “what happened”. These stories offer openings, not closure. Or, if they offer closure, it is of an instinctive, emotional kind.

None of which need concern readers who are unfamiliar with these characters’ history. The tales collected here are complete narratives, and if The Crimson Petal had never existed, I would wish to have written them regardless. ‘A Mighty Horde . . .’ gives me as much satisfaction as my best novels. In fact, to my mind, it is a novel, with a novel’s scope and richness of theme. It’s done with fewer words, that’s all.

But why these characters, and not others? Why this slim volume, and not more? Because these were the tales that demanded to exist. There were other characters I was curious about, characters I wished I could spend more time with. They had moved away, disappeared into history. I had to let them go. My one serious regret is that I didn’t manage to write a story about Henry Racham, a decent man who deserved so much more than he got in The Crimson Petal. I offered him an opportunity to live again, as a younger person, even as a child; I urged him to seize the chance to say the things he’d been too shy to say the first time round. He remained too shy.

Such things must be respected.

This, then, is all there is. I can understand why some readers might still wish to know more about what became of Sugar. Revisiting my accumulated correspondence, I wish I knew what became of some of the readers who took the trouble to write to me. The man who had cancer and read The Crimson Petal in hospital: is he still alive? The prostitute who said she was leaving the game and returning to education: did she? And so on. But I will probably never know. But then, I’d thought I would never know the things in these stories. And now I know.

Michel Faber.

From the foreword in the hardback edition of The Apple, published in 2006.

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