Critical Praise

"With passion, feeling, and a keen eye for detail, Roxana Robinson brings chillingly to life a family and a family tragedy, showing us how --- like a luminous yet ominous landscape --- their tangible visible world can coincide with the invisible, tumultuous world of their emotions."

—Lily Tuck, author of The News From Paraguay

"Cost is a gritty portrait of the havoc wreaked upon a family by one member's drug addiction. Roxana Robinson's vivid, sensuous prose moves effortlessly among relationships and points of view, evoking a brutal war between familial love --- in its infinite power and mystery --- and the mechanical devastations of pathology."

—Jennifer Egan, author of The Keep

"Cost is stunning. Each of the characters is so perfectly realized, each is made known to us with such heart and intelligence. This is a very big book: the territory of family is more fragile and dangerous than any geography we know, and Roxana Robinson has made life of that. I loved, admired, and was frankly undone by every minute of it.”  "

—Susan Richards Shreve, author of A Student of Living Things

"Roxana Robinson is surely one of the most graceful stylists and psychologically perceptive writers working. … Cost approaches the subject of drugs’ impact from an original and very significant angle. This book shows further the extent of Robinson’s insights into the whirl, the generational ironies at work, and the desperate indulgences to which we turn in our confusion. Cost is an important, timely book that furthers insight into our present fortunes and dilemmas."

—Robert Stone, author of Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties