Jacob Dupree is sixty-five. He once built fashion collections from Amsterdam to Hong Kong. Now he stands before a mirror in a bare apartment, trying to hold his hand steady enough to knot his tie for a job interview.

After a bankruptcy in Jakarta, he is back in the Netherlands — not as a homecoming, but as an arrival in a country that carries his name but no longer knows him.

The Return was written as events unfolded, the protests on Amsterdam’s Dam Square, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and the escalating tensions across the Middle East. Not reconstructed after the fact, but in real time. The urgency you feel on the page is not a stylistic choice.

The novel is structured around the twelve tribes of Israel. Each chapter carries the name and character of a tribe as a moral compass, an ancient architecture attempting to order a contemporary life that refuses to be ordered.