Allegany County, Alfred University, the Alfred Sun, and more are featured in Brower’s new book being released September 10, 2026
From Jacob Brower, author of “September 10”
Jack McCune never grew up on a farm outside Andover.
He never attended Alfred University. He never worked for Fiat Lux. He never spent Friday nights covering area high school football games for The Alfred Sun.
Jack McCune doesn’t exist.
But in September 10, a new novel by Jacob W. Brower, Allegany County is where much of his fictional life begins.
The book, which will be released Sept. 10, 2026, exactly 25 years after the day on which it is set, follows McCune, a 40-something finance executive working in the World Trade Center, through an otherwise ordinary Monday on Sept. 10, 2001.
It also looks backward across his life. Jack grows up on a farm outside Andover before enrolling at Alfred University in the mid-1970s. He doesn’t arrive intending to become a journalist. He simply finds his way into the Fiat Lux newsroom and discovers he belongs there.
During football season, Jack picks up extra work on Friday nights covering area high school games for The Alfred Sun. The assignments give him a little pocket money and more opportunities to write.
His work for Fiat Lux eventually takes him somewhere the kid from a farm outside Andover never expected. The newspaper receives credentials to cover a New York Giants preseason game at the Meadowlands, and Jack goes as a photographer. Television cameras catch him on the sideline talking with Giants players, leaving classmates to ask him afterward, “Didn’t I see you on the sideline talking to the Giants?”
There is a real-life parallel to Jack’s fictional college years. Twenty-five years later, Brower was a college journalism student in Missouri, working for his student newspaper and freelancing for his local newspaper. He went on to spend 18 years in the newspaper business.
“I approached the book like historical nonfiction,” Brower said. “Jack and the people around him are fictional, but the world they inhabit isn’t. They’re walking through a real timeline in the real world. I wanted the details to hold up.”
That meant building Jack’s fictional childhood and college years around the real communities of Andover and Alfred, the real Alfred University and the real newspapers he would have encountered there.
The same approach extends throughout the rest of the novel.
If Jack remembers a football game, the game happened. If he remembers a concert, the concert happened. If he reads a magazine, Brower wanted to know what was actually inside that week’s issue.
“There are a lot of continuity Easter eggs for people willing to search for them,” Brower said. “You can find audio of the exact moment Jack originally planned to propose to his future wife. You can even watch the last thing he watched before he went to sleep.”
“The book has to work if you never look up a single thing,” Brower said. “I didn’t want it to read like somebody showing off his research. But if you’re the kind of person who stops and thinks, ‘Wait, did that really happen?’ I wanted the answer to be waiting for you.”
The fictional timeline eventually catches up with Sept. 10, 2001. By then, Jack is married, has a 6-year-old daughter and works in finance in New York City.
The book begins and ends on that Monday, before midnight, and never reaches Sept. 11. Neither the characters nor the narrator knows what will happen the following morning, and the book contains no foreshadowing.
“I’m a journalist and history nerd who stumbled onto a fiction book,” Brower said. “September 10 has always fascinated me because I don’t remember any of it. I was a working journalist at the time, and for me, like almost everyone else, it was just a Monday.”
Brower had already completed “a good chunk” of the novel before realizing 2026 would mark the 25th anniversary of the day on which it is set.
“Once I realized that, it became important to me that the book be released on that day,” he said.
September 10 will be released Sept. 10, 2026, and will be available through Amazon and select bookstores.
Jacob W. Brower was a newspaper journalist for 18 years before founding a marketing and consulting firm in Springfield, Missouri, in 2018.
