The Lookback Window

New York Times Editors’ Choice Vanity Fair's 20 Favorite Books of 2023 Debutiful Best Book of the Year Crimereads Best Debut of August “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. Hertz’s debut is “cathartic and revelatory…[and] a gritty recovery story that packs a punch” (The Bay Area Reporter). It offers a startling glimpse at the unraveling of trauma—and the light that peeks, faintly, and often in surprising ways, from the other side of the window.