Dennis Bock’s first two novels were about the fallout from war: the Second World War in 2001’s The Ash Garden, and the Spanish Civil War and Second Sino-Japanese War in 2006’s The Communist’s Daughter. The fallout in his latest, about two estranged brothers whose marriages simultaneously fall apart, is of a more intimate nature, but feels no less powerful for being so.

The novel is narrated retrospectively by Charlie, who after almost two decades in Spain has come home to Toronto, where he hopes to expand the chain of language schools he runs and gain perspective on his foundering marriage. The move is bittersweet: Charlie’s tween daughter, Ava, still in Madrid with her mother, deeply resents his departure. Returning home also necessitates a reckoning with his older brother, Nate, to whom he’s barely spoken since the latter’s boorish actions more than a decade before.

Now a successful lawyer, Nate is embroiled in a bitter divorce and custody battle over his two young sons. Charlie tries to assume the role of supportive brother and uncle, but there are unsettling signs of the old intensity reasserting itself. A few months after Charlie arrives, Nate goes missing on a sailing trip in Florida.

Charlie is in his mid-forties, and the novel ably balances the build-up to Nate’s disappearance with a convincing meditation on that liminal age. Charlie’s encounter with an ex-flame sets the narrative looping back to the personal tragedy that first brought them together in university. Later, he starts dating, but finds the pleasure mitigated by his feelings of guilt over abandoning Ava.

It nagged at me slightly that, though Charlie’s wife and daughter are both Spanish, they seem to speak without inflection, like North Americans. Elsewhere, though, Bock’s writing is what’s generally referred to as “transparent.” It has a propulsive quality that makes it less like a window and more like a windshield: a great deal goes rushing vividly by. Going Home Again consistently hits the sweet spot between understatement and intense readability, making its lo-fi refusal to show off feel like a kind of flair.