The Man Who Saw Seconds: Book Launch and Live Music

The Man Who Saw Seconds is a Publisher's Weekly notable book for spring/summer 2024, this year's lead title for CLASH Books Publishing (New York), was featured in the American Bookseller Association's annual conference (Winter Institute) and is getting great reviews. Help North Vancouver author Alexander Boldizar celebrate the launch, with a comic and live music from two local bands: Hot Flash and Jet Lag.

Entry: Buy a book or say you've already bought one

About the book:

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 RandD. 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.

Early reviews:

There are books on brain physiology, books on anarchist philosophy, books on the nature of time. There are certainly books whose hero is pursued by governments of all stripes, books in which the entire world is at stake. There are books whose body counts put Schwarzenegger movies to shame. But there has never been a book to combine all these with supreme intelligence, set not in some remote future but an all-too-plausible present. The Man Who Saw Seconds is the first." -Aaron Haspel, author of Everything

"The Man Who Saw Seconds is wickedly smart, outrageously funny, and unsettling in its accuracy. The satire is pointed, and the action is non-stop. Think: Elmore Leonard meets Nabokov, Michael Crichton meets Vonnegut, Carl Hiaasen meets Joseph Heller. And it has what is probably the best gunfight in literary history. But this book is more than a fast-paced satire. It's a warning for America, for the world, really. And, at its core, it's a poignant love story. The Man Who Saw Seconds is destined to be a classic and, with it, Boldizar's place as one of literature's most important satirical writers is assured." -Kevin Winchester, author of Sunflower Dog

"The Man Who Saw Seconds is a thinking reader's thriller, the story of a simple family guy who just happens to be able to see five seconds into the future. Meticulously researched, surprisingly philosophical, The Man Who Saw Seconds is a brilliant page-turner, a book about brain function and perception, national intelligence systems and law enforcement, the nature of time and space. A lot of smart people can't write fiction-too smart, too self-absorbed. But Boldizar is one of our happy exceptions. This book is a blast." -Pete Duval, author of The Deposition

"Alexander Boldizar's brilliantly wild The Man Who Saw Seconds is part thriller, part gunfight (hell of a gunfight), part intellectual examination of what we mean when we say 'freedom,' and all heart. Absurd, hilarious, and deadly serious, this is the rare novel that is both compulsively readable and philosophically deft. If the thought of Kafka as a chess boxer, or Kundera fighting a polar bear excites you, this is definitely the book for you." -Mark Powell, author of Hurricane Season

"With Jason Bourne's frenetic pace and The Terminator's body count, The Man Who Saw Seconds is at the surface an action-packed thriller. But as I raced through the pages I also delighted in Boldizar's intelligence and humor as-bit by bit-he shows us how male decision cycles and egos can escalate the mayhem. I kept thinking, 'No, he won't, but then he did, and I was fascinated at every turn. This nail-biting novel left me blinking, reeling and contemplating fear and love, and the horrifying extremes we'll go to for each." -Emma Payne, author of Technology with Curves 

"By turns hilarious and harrowing, The Man Who Saw Seconds is our era's Dr. Strangelove, a brilliantly conceived sci-fi absurdist romp, where one man's tussle with local law enforcement escalates into a battle against the larger social institutions we labor to uphold while struggling to survive within, prisoners of our own fears. For in the derangement of time we must face both monsters and the abyss, while taking care to remember: to fight a monster is to risk becoming one yourself." -Joe Pan, author of Operating Systems

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Category: Arts | Books and Literature