The Lookback Window

An Electric Literature, Debutiful, and LGBTQ Reads Most Anticipated Book
“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.

Growing up in suburban New York, Dylan lived through the unfathomable: three years as a victim of sex trafficking at the hands of Vincent, a troubled young man who promised to marry Dylan when he turned eighteen. Years later—long after a police investigation that went nowhere, and after the statute of limitations for the crimes perpetrated against him have run out—the shadow of Dylan’s trauma still looms over the fragile life he’s managed to build in the city with his fiancé, Moans, who knows little of Dylan’s past. His continued existence depends upon an all-important mantra: To survive, you live through it, but you never look back.

Then a groundbreaking new law—the Child Victims Act—opens up a way forward: a one-year window during which Dylan can sue his abusers. But for someone who was trafficked as a child, does money represent justice; does his pain have a price? As Dylan is forced to look back at what happened to him and try to make sense of his past, he begins to explore a drug- and sex-fueled world of bathhouses, clubs, and strangers’ apartments, only to emerge, barely alive, 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.