The Taker

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

While it should be readily apparent that The Taker is a work of the imagination, a measure of research went into it, especially regarding the history of the state of Maine. I drew on two volumes in particular: Maine in the Early Republic, edited by Charles E. Clark, James S. Leamon, and Karen Bowden (University Press of New England, 1988), and Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier 1760-1820, written by Alan Taylor (University of North Carolina Press, 1990). Any mistakes or inaccuracies are my own.

It’s often said that a writer’s life is lonely and that we write in solitude, and while that’s mostly true, it would be impossible to make it to publication without relying on the help and good nature of many people along the way. I’d like to thank the readers of previous versions of this novel, including Dolores, Lisa, Randy, Linda, Jill, Kelley, and Kevin; my professors at Johns Hopkins, Tim Wendel, Richard Peabody, Elly Williams, David Everett, and Mark Farrington; Elyse Cheney and Jeff Kleinman for their early encouragement; and the wonderful organizers of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers.

Enormous thanks go to Tricia Boczkowski, my editor at Gallery Books, for her editorial guidance and boundless good spirits in getting the novel to publication. Also, my thanks to everyone at Gallery for their efforts on my behalf.

Tremendous and undying thanks to Kate Elton, my editor at Century, and her assistant Anna Jean Hughes, for their incredible enthusiasm and support for the novel.

Thanks are also due to Nicki Kennedy, Sam Edenborough, and Katherine West, foreign rights agents at the Intercontinental Literary Agency, and to the publishers of the foreign editions of The Taker, for their confidence in taking on this debut work: Giuseppe Strazzeri, publisher, and Fabrizio Cocco, editor, at Longanesi; Cristina Arminana at Mondadori; Katarzyna Rudzka at Proszynski Media; and EKSMO Publishing. Thanks, too, to Matthew Snyder at Creative Artists Agency for seeing promise in The Taker.

My deepest thanks must go to Peter Steinberg, my agent, not only for his belief in the novel but for his deft editorial work, which took a wobbly story and transformed it into the novel you have in your hands today.

Thanks to my family for putting up with my insanely writerly ways since I was a humorless little child.

And of course, all my love to my husband, Bruce, who patiently allowed me to sock countless hours into this book and made all my dreams come true.