Roxana Robinson’s latest novel, Cost, is an emotionally incisive story about change—the permeable bonds between family members and an individual’s fluctuating sense of self. The book gets at these themes by dwelling on its characters’ shifting roles, from child to parent, from friend to lover, from nurtured to nurturer and back again. Though this family-oriented fiction teeters on predictability—and sounds suspiciously like a ready-made candidate for Oprah’s Book Club—Robinson avoids cliché with her twisted characters and detailed, sometimes scathing observations.

Cost’s complicated web of family dynamics is spun around Julia Lambret, an art professor spending the summer on the rural coast of Maine. Still grappling with a painful divorce, she discovers that her youngest son, Jack, is addicted to heroin. What follows is a dramatic reevaluation of the stubborn solitude that she has too long cultivated. Julia reconnects with a family she thought she’d lost: the estranged ex-husband and his new wife, her reliable yet insecure older son, a distant sister, her imposing father and Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother. With this renewed sense of kinship, they all enter unfamiliar territory on a mission that is as much about reviving Jack as it is about rediscovering one another.

Although Robinson focuses on heavy-handed topics like aging, addiction and alienation, her characters aren’t oversentimentalized parodies or over-the-top tragic. And while her focus is on the the family, she captures what drives them apart just as well as what holds them together. The language is strong—occasionally lyrical but always tight—and Robinson’s penchant for detail eventually pushes this messy family drama to a succinct point: Relationships define who we are, whether we like it or not.

Robinson reads Thu, Jun 12.