Yesteryear: A GMA Book Club Pick: A Novel by Caro Claire Burke - 57

This book, and this author, owe a lifetime of gratitude to Lisa Grubka, agent extraordinaire. Thank you for seeing it all from the start.

Thanks also to Emma Finn, Kristina Moore, Orly Greenberg, Melissa Chinchillo, Sophie Baker, Samori Cullum, Yona Levin, and the rest of the UTA/Curtis Brown team for carrying Yesteryear around the world.

Thank you to Jenny Jackson and Katie Bowden for helping to pin this world into the shape of a novel, while also keeping time for us to turn over every rock and loosen (yes, loosen) every screw. Additional and bottomless thanks, in no particular order, to Harry Sherer; Tiara Sharma; Nora Reichard; John Gall; Emily Murphy; Nicola Webb; Olivia Marsden; Laura Keefe; Matthew Sciarappa; Tricia Cave; Jane Alison, Stuart Nadler, Erika Veurink, Natalie Warther, Puloma Ghosh, Suleika Jaouad, JJ Elliott, Carinn Jade, Heather Lazare, Hannah Beresford, and Katie Gatti Tassin. Thanks especially to Hollyn Huitt, for your eyes at the start, and Jayson Greene, for your eyes at the end.

When this novel was nothing but a first draft, I was given the extremely bizarre and wholly undeserved privilege of workshopping it with some of the greatest living artists and thinkers in the world. My conversations with Anne Hathaway in particular were instrumental in bringing Natalie to life. Thank you to Somewhere Pictures, Entertainment 360, and the Amazon film team for your passion, curiosity, and tireless championing of this novel.

No amount of thanks will ever suffice for my parents, my sister, and the Strand/Pels family.

And thanks, of course, to Riley.

Someone told me once that the mark of a good career is characterized by one’s ability to attain the rare kind of employment that’s meaningful enough to justify the time you spend away from loved ones. What a privilege to have finally gotten the job, so to speak—but the job will (the job should ) always pale in comparison to the life that surrounds it. Thank you, Riley, for this life. Thank you for supporting me for the better half of a decade as I wrote. Thank you for believing so doggedly that something would come of it—and thank you most of all, now that something has come of it, for giving me a life I am always desperate to return to when the work is done. At this very moment, as I write, you are whistling in the kitchen, making breakfast for the two of us. Keep the coffee warm, please. I’ll be finished in a moment.

Oh, and if I ever have a daughter: sweet girl, I wrote the ending with you in mind.