Ahead of Schedule

About this book

Ahead of Schedule is a warm, absorbing, quietly astonishing novel about the people who have been standing just out of frame in the history of invention. Nadine Halloway, thirty nine, is an examiner in the hard cases unit of a patent office in an invented American city, and she is very good at the one thing the job actually requires, which is telling the difference between a person who understands their own idea and a person who is repeating something they were told. Over eleven years she has quietly assembled a private file of applications that arrived decades before they should have been possible, and the file has grown into a pattern she cannot unsee: in every case there is a credited inventor who genuinely did the work, and beside them a helper, an assistant, a night technician, a translator, a man who fixed the furnace, who is thanked in one line and then never appears again anywhere, in any record, ever.