Evie is elated that Jakob has returned, and even more so that her theories of extraterrestrial life are correct – but crushed to find that her self-involved absence has caused their mother to not recognize her. Kassie is resentful and exhausted, having held everything together without help from Evie. The story of Light Years from Home is not what we think it is. We spend a good amount of time in each sibling’s perspective, accumulating slivers of the larger story.

All of the siblings have caused pain and are pained. So begins the multi-POV collage of past and present, memories seen through different eyes. He’s come back to Earth for safety, having escaped as a POW with information key to possibly ending the great war, once and for all – as long as he can find the device he transported ahead of himself that will unscramble this information, which he himself encoded for security against enemy spies. The fact that Jakob returns home at the start of the book, in fact, has nearly nothing to do with reconnecting with his family. He doesn’t know – or care – what happened to his father, who died searching for him his mother, Sofia, who’s slowly lost herself to dementia his twin, Kassie, a divorced family therapist singlehandedly caring for their mother or his youngest sister, Evie, who’s taken up the mantle searching for Jakob as part of a UFO conspiracy network. He’s barely thought of the family he left behind, as the time passed. And in the decade and a half he’s been gone, he has developed into a competent soldier, engineer, and devotee to the cause of fighting for the universe’s freedom on the side of the ‘‘Seven Bells,’’ the aliens who plucked him from Earth all those years ago. Jakob is, indeed, gone: conscripted into an alien army fighting an intergalactic war. Jakob, however, seemed to be gone – forever.

Arnold returned, a few days later, confused, clutching onto a strange object and a story of alien abduction. Fifteen years ago their father, Arnold, and one of the eldest twin siblings, Jakob, went missing on a camping trip.

While Mike Chen’s newest novel, Light Years from Home, is far from abstract, Chen uses an interesting form of literary pastiche to drive the book: a frustrating, moving portrait of a broken family forced to heal old wounds. He often relied on cut paper forms to build his work, famously stating, ‘‘You get a linear quality from collage that is more rapid than the swiftest drawn line.’’

The American painter, Conrad Marca-Relli, was known best for his abstract depictions of the body.

The Light Years by R.W.W. Greene