Every family holds secrets: kept from daughters, sons, parents and partners, they become as much a part of the web of our relationships as the shared truths. In Afterwards, Rachel Seiffert examines the tangled truths and silences in the relationships between a young couple, a grandfather and granddaughter, and a brother and sister.

At the centre is a love story between nurse Alice and painter and decorator Joseph. Their relationship grows in time, but not necessarily in trust. Although Alice shares all her hopes and fears, Joseph is silent when it comes to his Army service in Northern Ireland.

The other loving, but somewhat uncommunicative, man in Alice's life is her recently widowed grandfather, who served with the RAF in Kenya and is of a generation who didn't speak about the war.

This is the second novel from Seiffert, who was Booker nominated for her first, The Dark Room. In Afterwards, she uses the same pared-down, stilted style of writing, but to much less effect.

While Joseph suffers post-traumatic stress disorder, it is very difficult to feel sympathy for his rages and lows when he remains closed not only to his girlfriend, but also to the reader. Alice speaks of love and longing, but the lack of detail and depth makes her feelings forgettable. By the end of the book I couldn't care less whether they remained together, let alone if they found a way to share and soothe their secrets.

Although I expected the grandfather to remain more stand-offish, the time he spent with Joseph wasn't full of the revelations and shared battle tales that Seiffert has set up. There was an unspoken understanding, but one so personal to the two characters that it left more questions than it answered.

Seiffert's style, forgoing descriptions and avoiding speech tags, seems too harsh for the story she tries to tell in Afterwards. The germ of a decent read is there, but the lack of flesh and emotion left this reader with a heavy sense of frustration.

Rachel Seiffert will be at the Oxford Literary Festival on March 25.