Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Maren Wiederhold
Categories
Thriller / suspense fiction

THE MAN WHO SAW SECONDS

Alexander Boldizar

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 research. 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 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 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.

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Book Published 2024-05-21 by Clash Books

Comments

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..This nail-biting novel left me blinking, reeling and contemplating fear and love, and the horrifying extremes we'll go to for each.

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.

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.

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.

Publishers Weekly Notable Book Spring/Summer 2004 Read more...

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.

If you are used to prose like this, you might guess it early on, like I did on page 195. Nevertheless, it's still fun to read! And very, very thrilling. It tends to be a bit more political as my usual comfort zone, but I could take it, as it felt well thought through. Read more...

A split-second decision can change a life, but you have never experienced it snowball the way you do in Seconds, this fast-paced speculative novel.No novel in recent memory answers the question as convincingly: 'Will I risk destroying the world to save the people I love?' Boldizar raises stakes to world-tipping proportions and I literally lost sleep turning pages to discover what happens next. Seconds is a science fiction tour de force.

[T]his is a book of cinematic velocity and frequent, dark satiric impact. Think of it as a brilliant exercise in multi genre collage, a mash-up of some of the best elements of the thriller, the novel of ideas, anarchism, philosophy and quantum theory. Highly recommended. Read more...

The pacing is perfect, and the stakes ratchet up in a horrifying, relentless, and seemingly inevitable progression. Simultaneously, this is a novel that meditates on power and authority, and the ethics thereof. It doesn't offer simplistic answers; it insists the reader confront the problems presented, and thoughtfully contemplate the solutions presented... I hope this can be genre-spanning, and that it gets the attention it deserves from every awards list, science fiction or not. I hope that it gets discussed far and wide, and whenever we talk about how science fiction deals with politics, this is brought into the conversation.