“All happy families are alike,” wrote Tolstoy in Anna Karenina, “each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Which, if you agree, goes a long way to explaining why novelists focus on the latter.

When Rohinton Mistry’s Family Matters was published in 2002, several reviewers compared the Indian-born writer to Tolstoy. Mistry, who now lives in Canada, is best known for his 1995 prize-winning novel, A Fine Balance, about the Indian Emergency of 1975.

Family Matters, as the title suggests, is th...