Cost

Powerful, moving and gripping, this is an extraordinary novel about the ways that secrets and lies can tear a family apart.

When Julia Lambert settles into her idyllic Maine house for the summer, she plans to spend the time tending her fragile relationship with her father, a retired but demanding neurosurgeon, and her gentle mother, who is descending, unnoticed, into Alzheimer's. But a shattering revelation intrudes: her youngest son Jack, far from being the charming and much-loved maverick of the family, has spiralled into heroin addiction.

Desperate to save him, Julia calls on all the members of her loose-knit family: her elderly parents; remarried ex-husband; detached sister; and combative eldest son. As heroin sweeps through each of their lives, with its impersonal and devastating energy, it drags the family into a world in which deceit, crime and fear are part of daily life.

In her cool, elegant prose, Robinson delivers a novel of loss and love that is complex, surprising and breathtaking in its pace.

Reviews

'”Cost” is both lyrical and unsentimental, richly honest and humane … reading of uncommon stature.' Wall Street Journal

'Scarily good … what gives the story such emotional depth is Robinson's astute portrayal of the private anxieties that each family member harbors. [Robinson] has crept into corners of human experience each of us is terrified to approach.' Washington Post

‘Robinson has always been a sensitive and revelatory writer, but she attains new degrees of intensity here in her scorching depictions of the nightmare world of addiction. Her illuminations of the churning inner lives of her smart and deep feeling characters depict good people facing brutal forces beyond the reach of reason or love.’ Booklist (starred review)

‘A novelist drawn to the emotional dynamics inside families, Robinson here depicts the crisis unleashed by one parent's discovery of her child's self-destructive secret.’ Good Housekeeping

‘Artfully portrays a family transformed by the far-reaching consequences of a son's heroin addiction.’ Vanity Fair

‘Gripping . . . Robinson paints a chilling portrait of addiction. We can't always save each other, but there's a kind of redemption in the fight.’ People

About the author

Roxana Robinson is the author of three novels and three short-story collections. Four of her works have been named Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine and Vogue, among other publications.