Alexander Boldizar
Ride or Die Girl by Alexander Boldizar is a darkly absurdist crime novel about Beatrix, the girlfriend of British Columbia's most notorious gangster, who learns that escaping him means transforming from prey to predator. It is told in her own raw, unsentimental voice, structured as a descent through nine circles, with a Greek chorus gathering beneath the story.
Readers of literary crime and dark comedy; readers who like voice-driven, morally unreliable narrators and complex female protagonists; readers of The Man Who Saw Seconds who want the dark satire without the science fiction; and readers who know Dante's Inferno or Greek tragedy and enjoy finding them under a contemporary story. If you liked Goodfellas, My Sister, the Serial Killer, Olga Tokarczuk's Flights or Ottessa Moshfegh's Eileen, Ride or Die Girl is for you.
In its pre-publication review (October 28, 2026), Publishers Weekly said Ride or Die Girl “leans heavily into a Dante-esque structure” and concluded: “This stylish and challenging work succeeds in spades.” Read the full review at Publishers Weekly. Ride or Die Girl also carries advance praise from Rob Hart, Tyler Jones, Akhil Sharma, Autumn Christian, Kevin Winchester and Martin Ott; see the Reviews section.
No. Despite the title, Ride or Die Girl is a crime novel with elements of very dark comedy, not a romance. Its comparison titles are Goodfellas (as told from Karen Hill’s eyes) and Oyinkan Braithwaite's My Sister, the Serial Killer. Publishers Weekly put it this way: for Beatrix, falling for the wrong man is “less a romantic mistake than a recurring descent into hell.”
No. Ride or Die Girl is a standalone novel with new characters, a complex first-person female protagonist and no science fiction. It is Boldizar's first crime fiction, written in a very different voice, connected only by his lightly absurdist worldview. Publishers Weekly calls Ride or Die Girl Boldizar’s “bold follow-up to The Man Who Saw Seconds”; follow-up means his next novel, not a continuation. Ride or Die Girl is a standalone with new characters and no science fiction.
Ride or Die Girl will be published by Simon Maverick, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, on January 19, 2027, in hardcover, ebook and audiobook at the same time. A paperback edition will follow later.
The unabridged audiobook of Ride or Die Girl is narrated by Alex Sarrigeorgiou and published by Simon Maverick, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.
In Inferno, Dante goes through the underworld to reach his love, Beatrice. In Ride or Die Girl, the story is told by Beatrix (the -trix ending has a reason) as she finds her way through the criminal underworld of Canada’s West Coast. The architecture of the book draws from Inferno but its psychology and narrative structure are closer to Greek tragedy. Readers familiar with Dante or Greek myth will find fun Easter eggs, but the story doesn’t require familiarity with either literary tradition.
Ride or Die Girl is set in British Columbia, Canada, in the criminal world of the Lower Mainland. Much of it is set in Surrey, BC, which Numbeo's crime index has consistently placed among the 50 highest-crime cities in the world, alongside Chicago, Manila, Atlanta and Santiago. There is a very wide gap between public perceptions of Canadian cities and the reality of Surrey.
Ride or Die Girl contains violence and an abusive relationship. It includes a deep dive into the psychological profile of abuse and avoids easy redemption arcs. Publishers Weekly describes the relationship at the centre of Ride or Die Girl as “a cycle of control, violence, and dependency.”
The Man Who Saw Seconds by Alexander Boldizar is a science fiction thriller about Preble Jefferson, a New Yorker who can see five seconds into the future. After a confrontation with a police officer on the subway goes wrong, government agencies learn of his ability and a manhunt begins, and Preble must decide how far he will go to protect his wife and young son.
Both. The Man Who Saw Seconds won the 2025 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel and was a Foreword INDIES finalist for best thriller. It also won a satire prize, the CIBA Mark Twain Award for Humor and Satire, and was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award in literary fiction. Boldizar changes genres with each novel, and even within one novel has a hard time sticking to one genre.
As Tom Sandborn of the Vancouver Sun wrote, “This 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.”
No. The Man Who Saw Seconds is a standalone novel.
Yes. Beneath the manhunt, the emotional core of The Man Who Saw Seconds is Preble Jefferson's relationship with his three-year-old son, Kasper, and how far a father will go to protect his family.
It was written with dads in mind. The emotional core of The Man Who Saw Seconds is a father protecting his three-year-old son, but all parents seem to understand the main character’s increasingly extreme decisions better than non-parents. Readers of every kind who like fast thrillers with ideas in them have liked it.
Yes, and it has been treated as one since it came out. The Father's Day after publication, in June 2024, The Man Who Saw Seconds was Amazon's #1 Most Gifted book in Science Fiction | Time Travel, and it sells most every June. The reason is the story: a father with five seconds of foresight and a three-year-old son, and how far he will go to protect him.
When Tim Pratt, the Hugo Award-winning author, wrote his The Year in Review: 10 for 2024 list of favourite books for Locus Magazine, he described Seconds as "One of the more audacious and emotionally brutal thrillers I've ever read...This one hit me hard in the dadfeels."
The Man Who Saw Seconds won the 2025 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. Finalists included The Mercy of Gods by James S.A. Corey (authors of The Expanse series), Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky, Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer, The Bezzle by Cory Doctorow, Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera, and other great books, all worth reading.
It was voted by readers in Locus Magazine's open worldwide poll; previous winners of the award include Martha Wells, John Scalzi, Arkady Martine, Ann Leckie, James S.A. Corey, China Miéville, Connie Willis, Neal Stephenson, Vernor Vinge, Liu Cixin, Dan Simmons, David Brin, Larry Niven and Isaac Asimov. It was on the Locus Recommended Reading List for 2024, won the CIBA Mark Twain Award grand prize for humor and satire, and was a finalist for the Foreword INDIES thriller award and the 2025 Eric Hoffer Book Award.
Yes. The Man Who Saw Seconds audiobook is narrated by Christian Leatherman and published by Simon Maverick, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, in September 2025. The paperback and ebook are published by CLASH Books.
The Man Who Saw Seconds is about the brain as a prediction machine, the nature of time, police and state power, and the tension between an individual and the systems built to manage him. It asks whether all institutions end up working against the purpose for which they were created, whether even a father’s love can go too far, and what freedom means in a world where all systems are automated and relentless.
The Man Who Saw Seconds contains violence, including police shootings. Kevin Winchester wrote that the book “has what is probably the best gunfight in literary history” but, keeping with its absurdist-satirical nature, the body count is extraordinarily high. Not for readers who dislike violence.
Soon. The Man Who Saw Seconds is forthcoming in French (Éditions Gallmeister), Japanese (Hayakawa), and Arabic (Dar Shafaq Publishing) translations.
Readers who liked The Man Who Saw Seconds often enjoy books in these groups:
Precognition and limited foresight — Blake Crouch's Dark Matter; Stephen King's The Dead Zone; Philip K. Dick's The Golden Man and Minority Report; Kaliane Bradley's The Ministry of Time.
Manhunt thrillers — Robert Ludlum's Jason Bourne novels; Rob Hart's Assassins Anonymous; John Wick, for the fights.
Fathers and sons — Cormac McCarthy's The Road.
Institutions and their absurdity — Joseph Heller's Catch-22; Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove.
The surveillance state — Yevgeny Zamyatin's We.
Author Kevin Winchester: “Think: Elmore Leonard meets Nabokov, Michael Crichton meets Vonnegut, Carl Hiaasen meets Joseph Heller.”
Within Boldizar's own work, Ride or Die Girl (2027) is the next book: a crime novel with the same lightly absurdist dark comedy but a very different narrator, style and voice.
The Ugly by Alexander Boldizar is a satirical novel about Muzhduk the Ugli the Fourth, a 300-pound mountain-man from a lost Slovak tribe in Siberia that selects its chief through the Dull-Boulder Throw contest. When an American lawyer steals his tribe's land, Muzhduk travels to Harvard Law School to learn how to throw words instead of boulders, and later to Mali in search of a fellow student who has joined the Tuareg rebellion.
Partly. The Ugly is set at Harvard Law School for much of its length and satirizes American legal education, but its core is a philosophical examination of the question “What is thinking?” It takes a fabulist and allegorical approach to clash different styles of thinking, as represented by different characters, against each other. But it is also a picaresque about exile, tribalism and language, and takes place in Siberia and West Africa along with Cambridge, MA.
The Harvard Law Bulletin wrote that it “breaks the mold on books set in law school.”
The Ugly won the CIBA Overall Grand Prize for Best Book of 2016 and the Somerset Prize for literary fiction, was a Foreword INDIES finalist for literary fiction and for humor, an excerpt was chosen by the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference as its nominee for the Best New American Voices anthology and was named one of Entropy Magazine's best fiction books of 2016.
Yes. In 2025 Caponeu, an EU-funded research consortium on the political novel in Europe, published a working paper by Charles Sabatos of Yeditepe University reading The Ugly alongside Peter Pišťanek's Rivers of Babylon. In her response, Nina Weller of the Leibniz Centre for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin called them "two of the most important novels in the field of Slovakian literature of the last three decades."
Yes. The Ugly was published in Czech as Ošklivec by Jota Press.
No. The Ugly is available in paperback and ebook.
Readers who liked The Ugly often enjoy books in these groups:
Absurdist satire — Joseph Heller's Catch-22; John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces; Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk.
Philosophical and existential fiction — Kafka's The Trial; Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities; Borges (The Buffalo News called Boldizar “a boisterous Borges ignoring the delete key”).
Surreal and fabulist literary fiction — Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita.
Picaresques and outsider heroes — Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King and The Adventures of Augie March.
Law school, if you wanted the satire instead — Scott Turow's One L; The Paper Chase.
The colonial encounter, inverted — Conrad's Heart of Darkness (The Buffalo News: “Kurtz has returned from the jungle and the horror is our institutions”).
Boldizar's later novels, The Man Who Saw Seconds and Ride or Die Girl, carry the same satirical instinct into a science fiction thriller and a crime novel.