Daniel Halloran has spent nineteen years on the night shift at Kasprzak’s Bakery on Cedar Avenue, shaping rye and kaiser rolls under a round schoolhouse clock that the founder kept exactly four minutes fast. He is quiet, kind, and invisible, and he likes it that way.

Then one October night his heart stops on the bakery floor. For four minutes. Stan Kasprzak, the stubborn seventy-six-year-old owner who has been like a father to him, brings him back with his bare hands, counting in Polish.

When Daniel wakes, something has changed. Every morning, as the sun comes up over East Mountain, he sees pieces of the future: a child’s bicycle under a truck, an old woman on icy church steps, a fire that has not started yet. Quietly, without telling anyone, he begins to help the people of his town.

But one morning the sun shows him a sign taped to the bakery door, in a friend’s handwriting, with a date on it. And for the first time, nothing Daniel does will change what he sees.

Tender, funny, and deeply human, A Little Ahead of Time is a novel about friendship and grief, about a boy who decides to be the caboose, about a nurse who refuses to be afraid, and about learning, at last, to simply watch the morning come.