For their material support during the writing of this novel I am extremely grateful to Antanas Sileika and the Humber School for Writers; Sheila Bauman and the Edna Staebler Writer-in-Residence program of Kitchener Public Library; Professor Anthony Cicerone and the Canadian Studies program of Bridgewater State University; Steven Hayward and the Creative Writing program of Colorado College; Greg Hollingshead and the Writing Studio of the Banff Centre; Professor Jeremy Adelman and the Canadian Studies program of Princeton University; Andrew Westoll and the Writer-in-Residence program of the University of Toronto Scarborough; and the Canada Council for the Arts.
For their generous permission to use a reproduction of Alex Colville’s Pacific 1967 for the novel’s cover my sincere thanks to Ann Kitz and the Colville estate and to A.C. Fine Art Inc., which owns the copyright.
I am deeply indebted to my agents, Anne McDermid and Martha Webb, and to my U.S. publicist, Saverio Mancina, for continuing to take me seriously; and to my incomparable editor at Doubleday Canada, Martha Kanya-Forstner, for always being a reader I could trust.
Of the many sources I consulted in writing this novel, Jeff Warren’s The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness was particularly helpful. Special thanks also to John Montesano for his insights on Toronto’s neighbourhoods and history.
The poem by Gaius Petronius Arbiter cited in the novel is from Chapter LXXIX of the Satyricon and is a liberal translation from the original Latin indebted to many other translations from across the centuries as well as to Google Translate.
My greatest thanks go to my children, Luca, Virginia and Sarah, for helping to spare me the fate of the protagonist in this novel, and to my wife, writer Erika de Vasconcelos, for her indulgence, advice and support, and for filling my life with beauty and love.