At twenty-eight, Peter Kafka is already a chief curator in New York City's rarefied art world-brilliant, relentlessly self-inventing, and forever one step away from coming undone. Ten years after his mother's death, he is finally ready to unveil the twenty paintings he has poured his soul into. The moment meant to define him instead detonates everything.
Over three feverish days, Peter ricochets through galleries, dimly lit bars, and the restless streets of Manhattan as his world fractures. Haunted by his father's long shadow, a shattered tooth, gambling, and the black-dog fears he can never outrun, he finds an unexpected stillness in Daiane, an alluring woman whose magnetic presence opens something in him he had long closed. But stillness, for a man like Peter, is its own kind of danger.
What begins as an unravelling becomes a wild, intimate reckoning-with grief, with beauty, and with the ambition that has always been his engine and his wound. At its heart burns a single question Peter cannot escape: if you had to live your life again-every loss and every triumph-exactly as it happened, would you say yes?
Darkly funny and philosophical, The Eternal Return is a bold, provocative novel about passion and pain, purpose and possibility, and our enduring quest for meaning in a world that keeps pushing us toward the edge.
