"Hertz has managed to tell a story of queer healing with all the narrative force of a thriller and the searing fury of an indictment." -The New York Times Book Review
A fearless debut novel of resilience, transcendence, and the elusive promise of justice.
Brooklyn, 2019. Dylan has lived through the unfathomable: three years as a victim of sex trafficking as a teen. Now years later-long after a police investigation that went nowhere with the domestic life he built to survive-the Child Victims Act opens up a way forward: a one-year window to sue past abusers, but once the lookback window starts, Dylan seeks answers everywhere: in the druggy reveries of Fire Island to the love-drunk strangers of summer nights downtown and the lawyers who watch over the park, finally emerging from an erotic and violent spiral with a new clarity of purpose: a righteous determination to gaze, unflinching, upon the brutal men whose faces have haunted him for a decade, and to extract justice on his own terms. Kyle Dillon Hertz is the author of The Lookback Window, a New York Times Editors' Choice. His work can be found in Esquire, Freeman's, Time, and more. He received his MFA from NYU and a residency from Yaddo. He teaches at The New School. "Hertz has managed to tell a story of queer healing with all the narrative force of a thriller and the searing fury of an indictment. It's an achievement of language, of style, in which the process of finding one's way back to the world is considered at least in part as an act of learning to 'speak the unspeakable.' It's a matter, Hertz seems to say, of finding the right words. . . . At his best, Hertz sheds the trappings of traditional realism, adopting instead a swerving, almost psychedelic style that mirrors the abrupt and mercurial perceptions of a turbulent mind. He follows the worthy example of writers like Jean Rhys, Gary Indiana and Denis Johnson."-The New York Times Book Review
