ALL IN THE FAMILY

New fiction looks at the ties that bind.

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You can never go home again, as the saying has it, and yet nothing offers a richer literary backdrop than the site of one's upbringing. In Lynn Steger Strong's The Float Test (Mariner), the narrator returns to Florida, where she was raised by busy parents who directed their attention toward their careers rather than their four spirited children. Now adults, those children have descended on their childhood home, toting weighty emotional baggage (as well as memories of nighttime drives with the sea and salt on their skin), to commemorate the death of their mother. They are all uncovering something in the process—a gun in their mother's closet is the Chekhovian catalyst for this emotional mystery. Strong's characters are deeply interior, but hers are not static, solipsistic books; they have an engrossing momentum, this one included.

Another family drama set in the Sunshine State plays out in Tova Mirvis's