The Winter Family (44 page)

First and foremost, I would like to thank my agent, Carolyn Forde, and everyone at Westwood Creative Artists (including Jake Babad, who provided an enthusiastic early read) who worked tirelessly to get this book published. My manuscript was the dictionary definition of “unsolicited” but Carolyn took me on as a client anyway and stuck with me for the long haul. I could not have done it without you; thank you so much.

I am also deeply grateful to Melissa Danaczko, my editor at Doubleday, who worked with me in her spare time for almost a year to help me improve this book before Doubleday acquired it, and to Anne Collins, my editor at Random House Canada, for her insightful edits and for providing me with a Canadian publisher when I needed it most.

I would also like to thank Helen Reeves, a freelance editor who assisted me with an early version of this book, and Amy Ryan, my amazing copy editor at Doubleday.

I self-published an early version of
Oklahoma 1891
with the assistance of my good friend Jeremy Panda. Thank you so much, Jeremy. Thanks to Steve Sal Debus for letting us use his store for the launch, to Maggie Prodger, for doing the design, and to all of my friends who came out and supported me during those days. It meant so much to me.

Finally I would like to thank my parents, Tom and Jenny, for supporting me in everything I do, and my sister, Jessica, and her husband,
Will (and all of my fans in Uganda) for their kind encouragement, and my wife, Cathy, and our son, Anthony, for everything, but most of all, for this:

Clifford Jackman was born in Deep River, Ontario, and grew up in Ottawa. He studied English literature at York University and Queen’s University before attending Osgoode Hall Law School and being called to the bar in 2008. He lives in Guelph, Ontario, with his wife, Cathy, and his son, Anthony.