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Book Summary and Reviews of Going Home Again by Dennis Bock

Going Home Again by Dennis Bock

Going Home Again

by Dennis Bock

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  • Published:
  • Aug 2013, 272 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

After two acclaimed historical novels, one of Canada's most celebrated young writers now gives us the vibrant, contemporary story of a man studying the suddenly confusing shape his life has taken, and why, and what his responsibilities - as a husband, a father, a brother, and an uncle - truly are.

Charlie Bellerose leads a seminomadic existence, traveling widely to manage the language academies he has established in different countries. After separating, somewhat amicably, from his wife, he moves from Madrid back to his native Canada to set up a new school, and for the first time he forges a meaningful relationship with his brother, who's going through a vicious divorce.  Charlie's able to make a fresh start in Toronto but longs for his twelve-year-old daughter, whom he sees only via Skype and the occasional overseas visit.  After a chance encounter with a girlfriend from his university days, a woman now happily married and with children of her own, he works through a series of memories - including a particularly painful one they share -as he reflects on questions of family, home, fatherhood, and love. But two tragic events (one long past, the other very much in the present) finally threaten to destroy everything he's ever believed in.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"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." - Publishers Weekly "Starred Review. Finely crafted, disarmingly casual prose that quietly penetrates the reader's mind and heart." - Kirkus

This information about Going Home Again was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Dennis Bock Author Biography

Dennis Bock is a Canadian novelist from Belleville, Ontario. His first book of stories, Olympia, won the 1998 Canadian Authors’ Association Jubilee Award, the inaugural Danuta Gleed Award for best first collection of stories by a Canadian author and the British Betty Trask Award.

His first novel, The Ash Garden, was a #1 national bestseller and was shortlisted for the prestigious 2003 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Amazon.com/Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Kiriyama Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book (Caribbean and Canada Region). It won the Japan-Canada Literary Award.

The Communist's Daughter was published in 2006 in Canada, and 2007 in the USA.

He lives with his family in Toronto, Ontario.

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