This is a novel of great brilliance and subtlety. It contains scenes of enveloping psychological force but is open-ended, its extraordinary last section suggesting that fulfilment of long-standing aspirations can arrive, unanticipated, in late middle-age. Human dramas are offset by landscape and animals feelingly delineated, and David Colmer's translation is distinguished by an exceptional (and crucial) ear for dialogue.

There are certain stories that both ask for and reward rereading, and not according to the Great Work of Art notion that demanding, ambitious works like Ulysses and Hamlet sustain multiple engagements over a lifetime. I mean instead that more modest, deceptively simple works tend to reveal their many smaller gems of wisdom and beauty on second, third and even 20th readings. Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead – her luminous novel about an old Kansas preacher’s relationship to his young son and to the changing world around them – and Ernest Hemingway’s Big Two-Hearted River – a pitch-perfect short story about a damaged young man’s effort at a restorative fishing trip in northern Michigan – come to mind.

Gerbrand Bakker’s debut novel, The Twin, while not as accomplished as either of these works, has a similar feel to it. The winner of the 2010 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award is unapologetically slow-paced, patient in its revelations, almost ritualistic in its descriptions of quotidian things, melancholic and meditative in its narrative voice and capable, at its best moments, of bringing off remarkably moving and tense passages concerning a middle-aged Dutchman’s fraught relationship to his aged father, a relationship permanently and tragically forged in fracture by the accidental death of the Dutchman’s twin brother – the always preferred son – when they were teenagers.

But these men are so silent in the assessment of their own lives, and this is such a sad and bleak story, that no matter how delicate the touch and how subtle the undercurrents, it makes for a sad, bleak read.