Join us for 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 long shadow of Dylan’s trauma still looms over the fragile life in the city he’s managed to build 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 never look back.
Then a groundbreaking new law—the Child Victims Act—opens a new way foreword: 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.
By turns harrowing, lyrical, and beautiful, Hertz’s debut 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.
Kyle Dillon Hertz received an MFA in fiction at NYU, where he was the Writer in Public Schools Fellow. He lives in Brooklyn.
Rasheed Newson is a television drama writer, a showrunner, and a novelist. Rasheed – along with his television writing partner, T.J. Brady – is a co-creator and executive producer of the drama series Bel-Air. Rasheed and T.J. have also worked on The Chi, Animal Kingdom, and Narcos, among other drama series. In addition to his work in television, Rasheed is the author of the novel My Government Means to Kill Me. It was named one of “The 100 Notable Books of 2022” by The New York Times, and it is a Lambda Literary finalist for Gay Fiction. Rasheed lives with his husband and their two children in Pasadena, California.
