The German word Herkunft can mean origin, ancestry or provenance. Any one of these could have functioned adequately as the English title of Saša Stanišić’s prize-winning third novel, but translator Damion Searls’s choice – Where You Come From – conveys a sense of the multiplicity that is intrinsic to this often brilliant novel. Where you come from is a fact, an undeniable series of branches on a family tree; but somehow I couldn’t help but read the words in an interrogable manner, imagining someone, possibly armed, demanding to know someone’s ethnic background.

Stanišić was 14 when the Bosnian war began in 1992, and escaped to Germany with his mother soon afterwards. His father joined them six months later, thinner and with a scar on his face they never discussed. In his previous two novels, Before the Feast and How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, he mined his family history and his own biography in a freewheeling narrative style that incorporated jokes, asides, repetition, diversions, digressions and pop-cultural references that pointed to a sense of gleeful improvisation; Where You Come From feels more honed and considered, more in control of its material. It is, at least at first, almost straightforward.

The last line of the first chapter reads: “It is March 7, 2018, in Višegrad, Bosnia-Herzegovina. Grandmother is eighty-seven years old and eleven years old.” Which is perhaps the heart of the novel: a sense that appearance, reality, the past and the present are in a constant state of flux. This is presented in an autofictional framework but, unlike the biographical work of, say, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Ali Smith or Olivia Laing, this is less an excavation of the mundane, a walk in dirty laundry, but more an examination of mundanity in the aftermath of a cataclysmic event.

In the chapter titled Lambs, he writes of a family feast, the roasting of a lamb, a minor infraction involving a football, of watching his mother and her friend tipsily talking by the fire. It is, as so many of these remembrances are, wonderfully alive, vital in its depiction of family life. Then Stanišić adds a coda: two years later, dozens of Muslim women are raped and killed at the same spot.

“Hardly any memory,” he notes, “is just personal; almost every one comes with a postscript, a footnote, of perpetrators and victims and atrocities that took place there.” It is perhaps why, when he meets with friends from the old days, they “talk almost exclusively about [their] current lives. Talking about the past would take calm and time and above all the courage to ask questions.” And also perhaps why, in 2018, he has begun to question his grandmother, Katrina, who has quickly slid into dementia, for fear that those memories will die with her.

It is a refractive prism, this deep delve into the past, so often leading to altered or misleading truths from established facts. A beautifully distilled scene in which his father chases away a snake in a graveyard is later debunked as rubbish by the very hero of the story. (This is told as a series of WhatsApp messages, the last of which is an all too familiar, yet no less heartbreaking, diminuendo.) The fallibility of memory is a well-worn trope, but Stanišić’s understanding of how memory can affect the contours of the present is consistently surprising.

For all the hatred that stirred the Bosnian war, the overwhelming, sometimes overheated, sense in Where You Come From is love: a kinship and communion that yolks entire generations. Characters always seem to be on their best behaviour and this can lead to the novel feeling sentimental at times, a touch ignorant of the dirt under the characters’ fingernails. If there are antagonists here, they are memory and time: two faceless enemies these characters cannot outrun.

The book’s conclusion, though, is a bravura, sustained and singular piece of writing that bursts with wit, heart and empathy. Tricksy as an extended Choose Your Own Adventure section might appear, it brings the novel together as a totality, delivering multiple endings, all of which land deftly in Damion Searls’s excellent translation.

Stuart Evers’s most recent novel is The Blind Light (Picador)

• Where You Come From by Saša Stanišić, translated by Damion Searls, is published by Jonathan Cape (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply