Hugest thanks to my agent, Rachel Ekstrom Courage. You are a phenomenal advocate and the best partner I could wish for on this literary adventure. What a joy to work together, and I am so excited for everything to come.
Thank you to my spectacular editor, Lara Jones. You caught all my blind spots and saw exactly what this book needed. I am so grateful for your astute edits and genius ideas, and for making the whole process so seamless and also such fun. And how lucky am I to have an editor with a degree in Italian to correct all my Italian gaffes!?
My heartfelt thanks to the wonderful team at Atria/Emily Bestler Books. To Emily Bestler, Libby McGuire, Dana Trocker, Megan Rudloff, Dayna Johnson, Hydia Scott-Riley, Karlyn Hixson, Morgan Hoit, James Iacobelli, Paige Lytle, Shelby Pumphrey, Jason Chappell, Dana Sloan, Nicole Bond, Abby Velasco, and everyone on the sales, audio, and education/library teams, thank you for championing my books, giving them the most stunning art, layout, and audio, and helping me make them into works that I am proud to send off into the world!
To my fantastic foreign rights agent, Heather Baror-Shapiro, and TV/film agent, Tara Timinsky, thank you for being such stellar advocates for my books. Thank you to Alessandra Shapiro for letting me pick your brain on all things Italian culture. And to John Hooper for your exemplary and indispensable book The Italians. Thank you to my cousin Gil Grant for helping me with medical accuracies—any errors are mine! And a special thanks to the Venice-Simplon Orient Express for the luxurious train inspiration vibes, from which I let my imagination run wild and took a few design alteration liberties.
Thank you to the authors who’ve blurbed my books—your endorsements and support are so meaningful, and I wish I could hug each of you in person in thanks. To the very best critique partner, Nicole Hackett: it’s so fun to get to walk this path together. To the uber talented, kind, and supportive author friends I’ve met along this crazy journey—I cherish each of you. Thank you to the fabulous bookstagram community: your creative, gorgeous, generous posts humble and thrill me, and it is such fun to get to chat with and get to know you all in the DMs, too. And to all the wonderful booksellers and librarians: while I live abroad and don’t often get to see you in person, I am bowled over by your support and look forward to visiting stateside to meet more of you. My deepest thanks to my fabulous readers; your messages and emails touch my heart, and I am so grateful for each of you who picks up one of my books! And thank you to the very best friends and family, including my wonderful aunts, uncles, and cousins, who support me, cheer me on, order copies of my books to distribute to their friends, send copies to their PR connections, and even decide to be deliberate walking advertisements, walking casually down the street with one of my books in hand face out so that passersby will take note. (Love you, Tor!) I adore and appreciate you all beyond measure—you each have such a special place in my heart!
Thank you to Jas for lending Nate your Italian alter ego, Fabrizio Salvatore, keeping a stock of my books at AAI, and being the most supportive and loving brother. And to Suz, for being my first and best reader who provides the smartest and most on-point edits—no way would my books be what they are without you, the other half of my writing brain! I am so particularly grateful for how you helped me hone and improve the parts of this book that contain some of our own family story. You two are not only my siblings but my best friends in the world, and it’s been that way from the start. We may often live on different continents, but I immeasurably cherish our phone and video chats and our time together when we get it. And thank you to Nadav and Arica, the best bonus siblings a girl could ask for. When I think about what I want to say about you two, the word I am looking for only exists in Hebrew—firgun. It means you always lift me up and celebrate me in such touching, heartfelt ways; I am the luckiest to call you both my brother and sister. And to the best nephews and nieces in all the land, Liad, Reagan, Griffin, and Noa—each of you is so special to and beloved by your Auntie Jac.
To my Bubsicles: ever since I was a kid, I’ve wanted to be an author, and you’ve shared that dream and belief in it right alongside me. You bought out the Sweet Valley section at Annie’s Bookshop, took me to the best teachers, and have told me innumerous times, with the certainty only a grandmother can express, about how much better my books are than fill-in-the-blank stratospheric bestselling author. I adore you, Bubsicles—thank you for loving me so hard and believing in me so big. And thank you to my beloved Zadie—I feel you with me always, and I know you are so proud of all of this.
To the most wonderful parents: you celebrate and champion me and all my books, but this one in particular carries both of your strong influences. Mom, we had some of my favorite brainstorm sessions in the pool, as you let me talk through all the twists of this plot. Thank you for answering my every call on basically the first ring—you are the most caring mom I could imagine. And Dad, not only are you MWF (my wonderful father) and my most hardworking salesperson, making sure that every golf buddy and men’s club member buys a copy of my books, but you have inspired this book in an enormous way. As I wrote in my author’s note, your courage and strength through some of the cruelest and most difficult obstacles are present in the character of Ansel. Though you are very different from Ansel as a person and a parent—you always made me feel so secure growing up, for instance—I gave Ansel some of the experiences and hardships of your childhood through which you persevered. (And I gave Max your proclivity for issuing very precise specifications when ordering your custom Zhitomir salad.) Thank you for ensuring that the parts of the book set in the Soviet Union are accurate to the tiniest detail, and for sharing with me—and my readers—why the atrocities committed there, and now happening in new ways in Ukraine at the hands of the Russian government, must be stopped at all costs.
And finally, thank you to my grandparents I never got to meet, Khana Vinarskaya and Shimon Goldis. I never had the opportunity to listen to your stories, and so I will never fully know the contours of your suffering, but I know this for sure: your potent legacy is your love for each other and your love for my father, and how, when you had so little, you still gave so much to those who needed it. That is the inheritance with which you have blessed us, your steadfast commitment that, even in the face of the worst evil and darkness, love and light and goodness will prevail.