Anita Shreve, a best-selling author whose novels explored change, loss and troubled marriages, often against the backdrop of a real historical event, died on Thursday at her home in Newfields, N.H. She was 71.

Her publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, said the cause was cancer.

Ms. Shreve drew critical acclaim and a large following with books like “The Weight of Water” (1997), an intricate story involving a long-ago crime and present-day dramas. Susan Kenney, reviewing that book in The New York Times, described it as “a cryptic long-lost narrative inside an impending family tragedy wrapped in a true-crime murder mystery framed by the aftermath of all of the above.”

The review continued, “Ms. Shreve unravels themes of adultery, jealousy, crimes of passion, incest, negligence, loss and guilt, and then manages somehow to knit them all together into an engrossing tale. The book became a 2000 film directed by Kathryn Bigelow.

Many of her books featured women in stressful situations, a setup she found rich in possibilities.

“In ‘The Weight of Water’ there’s a line,” she said in an interview last year with WBUR radio, “and it says, ‘If you push a woman to the edge, how will she behave?’ And that, to me, is a fascinating question.”