THE RETURN
A Novel by Jac de Gooijer
Jacob has learned how to leave. Hong Kong. Jakarta.
And now Amsterdam, where he believed that distance might finally solve something.But on the Dam, in the middle of a crowd calling out for justice, he stops, and no longer knows what he is looking for here, or what has brought him here.
The Return is a novel about a man who has spent his entire life moving between worlds: between East and West, between memory and the present, between the stories his mother gave him and a world that no longer understands those stories.
A novel about what happens when you can no longer stay away from who you are.About fathers and sons.
About guilt that moves through generations.
About the question of whether you can ever truly return to a place you never entirely left.
"Generations trembled within him,
echoes of stories his mother had told,
a chain of warnings stretching through time:
You have heard this before, and back then, it did not end well."
Amsterdam — a Wednesday afternoon
He wanted to walk home.
Clear his head in the cold.
But Dam Square was closed off —
not by barricades or police,
but by a wave of sound.
He felt it in his bones
before he even saw it.
"From the river to the sea."
Words he couldn't understand —
but could feel.
Generations trembled inside him.
Echoes of stories his mother had told,
and stories she had heard from hers.
This was never just about politics.
About the author:
Jac de Gooijer writes about the Bible, Israel, and the church, and about the questions that arise when ancient stories collide with a modern world. The Return is his debut novel.