Back to the Past

Eighty-three-year-old Sandy Weiner stands up too fast in his Boca Raton kitchen and wakes up as a twelve-year-old boy in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on October 14, 1955. He still has all seventy-one years of memory, and a nickel composition book to write it down in.

His deaf mother reads the whole world off people’s faces. His father has left, gone to Reno for a divorce, and married Fritzie. Now a judge in his shirtsleeves wants to know which parent a twelve-year-old will choose. The boy chooses his father.

He knows what is coming for his family, for the plumbing business he will build, and for the country. He also knows that four miles away, in Borough Park, a nine-year-old girl is asleep. In forty years she will be his wife, and in forty years and eight months she will be gone.

A time-travel novel, a family story and a love story, Back to the Past asks what a man would do with a second chance, and what he would not dare to touch.