The Lookback Window cover art

The Lookback Window

A Novel

Preview
Try Standard free
Select 1 audiobook a month from our entire collection.
Listen to your selected audiobooks as long as you're a member.
Get unlimited access to bingeable podcasts.
Auto-renews at $8.99/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

The Lookback Window

By: Kyle Dillon Hertz
Narrated by: Graham Halstead
Try Standard free

Auto-renews at $8.99/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for $26.81

Buy Now for $26.81

About this listen

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.
Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction

Critic Reviews

"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
No reviews yet
In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.