Ghassan Kanafani’s well-known novel Return to Haifa belongs to what Marianne Hirsch describes as the narrative of return, in which displaced people or their descendants seek to return to their former homes. Published in 1969, the novel is credited with sparking the interest of Palestinian writers in fictionalizing the repercussions of the return of Palestinians to their homes, their encounters with Israelis, and the myriad questions of memory, belonging, and closure that surround these encounters. But while Kanafani’s vision of this return was articulated very few decades after the 1948 Nakba, it is only recently that Palestinian writers began experimenting with the narrative of return. Several contemporary Palestinian novels feature Palestinians in the West Bank or in the diaspora visiting their former villages and homes inside Israel. This paper examines two recent Palestinian novels that revolve around the narrative of return: Rabai al-Madhoun’s 2015 Destinies: Concerto of the Holocaust and the Nakba and Walid al-Shurafa’s 2017 The Inheritor of Signs. It argues that these novels testify to the power of what we could call the Kanafani plot of return, where a tripartite relationship is established between the Palestinian returnee, the Israeli occupant, and their contest over the objects of memory, such as the house, the land, or the tree. In these narratives, the Israeli functions as an intermediary between the Palestinian and his/her memory, barring the latter from an unmediated, uncontrolled encounter with the past. The Paper will demonstrate how these novels rework the Kanafani plot in order to illustrate their disenchantment with the current realities of the Palestinian condition. If the return in Kanafani’s work signifies a call for militant optimism, these novels present a return that reflects the current mood of loss and defeat. The paper argues that these novels feature not only their protagonists’ attempted return to Palestine but, as importantly, their authors’ patent return to the richness of the Kanafani plot.