Being a high school English teacher can be a thankless job. But Muriel Densford of Sir Winston Churchill Secondary School in Vancouver inspired me to see books, and myself, in a different way, and I hope mentioning it makes the job slightly less thankless.
Thank you to my family—Moshe Mastai, Galit Mastai, Talia Mastai, Bill Morris, Mary Morris, and basically anyone with the last name or married to someone with the last name or related to anyone with the last name Mastai or Morris.
Thank you to my wife, Samantha Morris Mastai, and my daughters, Beatrix and Frances. Because of them I am a husband and a father and because of that so many things about this life finally make sense.
In my grandparents’ house there was a low shelf lined with battered old science-fiction anthologies from the 1950s and 1960s. As a child, I would carefully slip them out and stare at the brittle covers, thinking about the futures these artists and writers imagined, already fixed in my distant past. My grandmother, Leonore Freiman, died in 2004 and my grandfather, Milton Freiman, died in 2006. That collection of anthologies is now on a shelf by the desk where I wrote this book. I still look at the covers sometimes.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ELAN MASTAI was born in Vancouver and lives in Toronto with his wife and children. He writes movies. This is his first novel.