"Flora," by Gail Godwin - NYTimes.com Orphans have long been a boon to literature. Part of their appeal is pragmatic: they're good for plot (parents have such a pesky habit of squelching adventure). But they're also ideal exemplars of a certain universal experience, what the writer Francis Spufford has called "the situation of abandonment." In his memoir, "The Child That Books Built," he says this experience "focuses a self-pity that everyone wants to feel sometimes," and expresses "the solitude humans discover as we grow up no matter how well our kinship systems work." In other words, we're all orphans at one time or another, at least in our hearts. Gail Godwin's 14th novel, "Flora," offers a veritable taxonomy of orphans: from the conventional, both-parents-died variety to the quasi-orphan (one parent still nominally in the picture) to the elective orphan (a runaway) to the reverse-orphan (a parent unmoored by the loss of a child). In fact, as the story unfolds, we realize it's populated almost exclusively by orphans of different stripes. It's a mark of Godwin's light, sure touch that this doesn't feel contrived. On the contrary, it begins to feel natural, inevitable that beneath the surface of any individual we'll find a lonesome soul, cut adrift. Spiritually adrift, that is. "Flora" doesn't belong to the venerable orphan-as-­wanderer tradition; its lineage can't be traced to Dickens or Dahl. In fact it's a doggedly stationary tale. Our protagonist is rooted firmly at home, waiting out a polio scare on a mountaintop in North Carolina. It's the summer of 1945. Helen Anstruther is 10. Her mother died of pneumonia when Helen was 3. Her beloved paternal grandmother has just died during the past spring, her heart giving out while she tried on an Easter hat. Helen's father still walks the earth - for what that's worth. He's ditched her for the summer, having gone off to do secret war work at Oak Ridge in Tennessee. Not that his presence is entirely missed. When home, he's generally burning the grilled cheese, getting sloshed on Jack Daniel's and making acerbic remarks. Flora, her mother's 22-year-old cousin, comes to be Helen's summertime companion. Having just completed a teacher training program, she takes rather too earnestly to her role as temporary guardian, toting sacks of flour and cornmeal, a tin cake box, an entire ham all the way from Alabama. "She was the first older person I felt superior to," Helen reflects. This had its gratifying moments but also its worrisome side. Flora is a full-fledged orphan, abandoned in infancy by a "trashy" mother, then at age 15 losing her father when he was "shot between the eyes during a poker game." Godwin complicates the caregiver dynamic by making young Helen an officious despot ("Already I was learning how effectively she could be managed by a simple look of disdain," she confesses after Flora's been in the house less than an hour), while Flora flutters around full of deference and praise. Better yet, Godwin complicates this dynamic by revealing how "simple-hearted" Flora will always have a leg up on Helen. Literally: as a child, she shared a bed with Helen's mother, and loves to tell how she'd sleep with one leg flung over the bigger girl, "so she wouldn't abandon her." Helen's mother was yet another orphan, having lost her parents to the flu epidemic at age 8. Taken in by Flora's father, she became, Flora rhapsodizes, "a little mother to me." Ready for a few more orphans? There's Finn, the recently discharged soldier who delivers groceries to this female household on top of the hill; he was adopted by relatives. ("Did your parents die?" Helen asks. "No," he replies, "but they had five kids and no money, and my father's cousin and his wife had money but no kids.") There's also Rachel Huff, Helen's friend from fifth grade, whose father might be away doing war work - but might not actually exist. By summer's end, Rachel and her mother will have "vanished into thin air." There's even the little girl in the mystery program Helen and Flora listen to on the radio. She gets separated from her mother in a department store only to join the community of the mannequins. In their world, they tell her, she can never get lost or feel abandoned again. Leah Hager Cohen's new nonfiction book, "I Don't Know," will be published in the fall.