Paula Fox, a distinguished writer for children and adults whose work illuminated lives filled with loss, dislocation and abandonment, conditions she knew firsthand from a very early age, died on Wednesday in Brooklyn. She was 93.

Her death, at a hospital near her home, was confirmed by her daughter, Linda Carroll-Barraud.

Ms. Fox wrote a half-dozen novels for adults and more than 20 books for young people. What united her output was a cool, elegant style that was haunting in its pared-down economy; minute observation; masterly control of tone and pacing; and an abiding concern with dissolution — of family, of home, of health, of trust.

Her characters are complex, self-contained and often withdrawn, but their ruminative interior states lend the narratives a quiet luminosity.

Ms. Fox’s best-known novel for adults is “Desperate Characters” (1970), about the disintegration of a marriage. It was made into a film of the same title, released the next year and starring Shirley MacLaine and Kenneth Mars.