The Man Who Saw Seconds

Winner, 2025 Locus Award for best science fiction novel of 2024

Winner, CIBA Mark Twain grand prize winner for best satire of 2024

Finalist, Foreword Reviews for best thriller of 2024

Finalist, Eric Hoffer Award

"10 for 2024" Year-End Best Books List

Preble Jefferson can see five seconds into the future.

Otherwise, he lives an ordinary life. But when a confrontation with a cop on a New York City subway goes tragically wrong, those seconds give Preble the chance to dodge a bullet-causing another man to die in his place.

Government agencies become aware of Preble's gift, a manhunt ensues, and their ambitions shift from law enforcement to military. Preble will do whatever it takes to protect his family, but as events spiral out of control, he must weigh the cost of his gift against the loss of his humanity.

A breathless thriller that will keep you on the edge of your seat until the very last page, The Man Who Saw Seconds explores the nature of time, the brain as a prediction machine, and the tension between the individual and the systems we create. Alexander Boldizar provides an adrenaline-pumping read that will leave you contemplating love, fear and the abyss.

Alexander Boldizar was the first post-independence Slovak citizen to graduate with a Juris Doctor degree from Harvard Law School. Since then, he has been an art gallery director in Bali, an attorney in San Francisco and Prague, a pseudo-geisha in Japan, a hermit in Tennessee, a paleontologist in the Sahara, a porter in the High Arctic, a consultant on Wall Street, an art critic out of Jakarta and Singapore, and a police-abuse watchdog and Times Square billboard writer in New York City.

He now lives in Vancouver, Canada. Boldizar's writing has won the PEN/Nob Hill prize, a Somerset Award for literary fiction, and other awards, including a Best New American Voices nomination. His novel, The Ugly, was a best-seller among small presses in the United States with several "Best Book of 2016" awards and lists. He has a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, is a founding director of a charity that brings circus to youth in at-risk communities, and was once challenged to a leg-wrestling contest by the founder of The Onion.