His new novel, “The Right of Return” (“Het recht op terugkeer”), a best-seller in the Netherlands, is a psychological thriller about a Dutch Jew whose son is kidnapped in 2004. His frantic search for the boy, which spans a 20-year period of the narrative, crisscrosses the United States, Holland and Israel and implicates global power politics. The book’s subplot is the fragile state of Israeli security; twenty years later, in 2024, the Jewish state is reduced to Tel Aviv, and the children and grandchildren of the Zionist pioneers have returned to the Diaspora. What remains in Tel Aviv is an amalgam of “elderly people, cynics, criminals, the hopeless, and those who enjoy apocalyptic moments,” de Winter remarked. They are scrambling to defend the last vestige of the Israeli state within an unfolding Middle East dystopia. Many of de Winter’s novels, particularly “Leo Kaplan,” capture the kaleidoscopic themes of a Woody Allen screenplay: death, love, Jewish pensiveness and desperation. Literary intelligence demands that de Winter’s books be translated into English. http://www.forward.com/articles/14209/