Going Home Again
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3.3 • 11 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
When Charlie Bellerose reunites with his flamboyant brother Nate, after two decades apart, their youthful rivalry seems forgotten. Drawn together again by their failed marriages, trying to survive in a world of long-distance parenting and hopeful reunions, they begin to imagine that they can be a new family of sorts. But Charlie’s chance encounter with his first love, Holly, now happily married, unravels his past and complicates his present, plunging him back to his bittersweet college days in Montreal and the fate of his best friend Miles, and forward into Nate’s dangerous attraction to Holly’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Riley. Yet even Charlie, with all he now knows about his brother, cannot foresee the violence to come.
A novel about the mysteries of the human heart, Going Home Again is rich with the exquisite tensions between men and women as they fall in and out of love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Although it opens with a murder, the third novel by the acclaimed author of The Ash Garden is a tale with modest reach about regret, the faded promise of youth, family and marital dynamics, and realizing limitations while moving forward. Narrator Charlie Bellerose recounts "a hell of a year" during which he separated from his wife Isabel, left her and their daughter Ava in Madrid, and returned to Toronto to establish his fifth language school. There, Charlie encounters Nate, his selfish elder brother, who reminds Charlie of his discomforting past. Nate is an affluent lawyer likewise facing "a divorce full to overflowing with discord and grievance," and the two brothers maintain an uneasy peace. Charlie runs into his first love, Holly Grey, prompting meandering episodes of remembrance: about the death of his parents; his university days in Montreal and close friendship there with both Miles Esler and Miles's girlfriend, Holly; Miles's seemingly accidental death; Charlie and Holly's deepening bond; and his solitary wanders through Europe and eventual arrival in Madrid, where he meets Isabel. Charlie's middle-aged ethical dilemmas about manhood, marriage, and family provide pleasant contrast to lengthy youthful travelogue that occasionally fails to make a strong impression.
