THANK YOU TO JENNA JOHNSON, a wonderful editor without whom this book would not exist. Thanks also to others who believed in this project in the early stages: Tom Tomaszewski, who makes everything possible; Simon Trewin, my agent and friend; Sam Ashurst; Hari Ashurst-Venn; Emilie Clarke; and Sarah Moss. I’d also like to thank my fantastic American agent Dan Mandel, for all his support; and my mother, Francesca Ashurst, for always being there.
Huge thanks to Jamie Byng, Francis Bickmore and all at Canongate for rescuing me from the hell of UK corporate publishing and giving The End of Mr Y the best home possible.
Thanks also to Rod Edmond, Jennie Batchelor, David Herd, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Jan Montefiore, Caroline Rooney, David Stirrup, Peter Brown, Donna Landry, Sarah Wood, David Ayers, Anthony Maude, Dennis Borisov, Deborah Wright, Stuart Kelly, Sam Boyce, Tony Mann, Andrew Crumey, Mel McMahon, Jason Kennedy, Mick Owens, Suzi Feay, and all my other friends and colleagues for their moral support.
Several friends, relatives and colleagues were kind enough to read the completed manuscript and provide feedback, and I am very grateful to Tom Tomaszewski, Sarah Moss, Jennie Batchelor and Hari Ashurst-Venn. I’d particularly like to thank Couze Venn for his insightful and thought-provoking comments and suggestions. Ian Stewart also took the time to read and comment on the manuscript in detail, for which I am very grateful. All errors remaining in the text are, of course, my own.
I would like to acknowledge the influence of some ideas I first found in Parallel Worlds by Michio Kaku, and Big Bang by Simon Singh. The idea of the primordial particle in Chapter 11 was directly inspired by Kaku’s work; and most of the material, including the Gamow quote, on p.XXX, comes from Simon Singh. The quote on p.98 is from Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. The quote on p.109 is from Lectures on Homoeopathic Materia Medica With New Remedies by J. T. Kent. Literary Portraits of the Polychrests, on p.XXX, is fictional, but was inspired by Portraits of Homoeopathic Medicines by Catherine R. Coulter.