Emily Maxwell is back.

The star of Stewart O’Nan’s novel “Emily, Alone” and a co-star of O’Nan’s “ Henry, Himself,” she plays a supporting role in the author’s latest, “Evensong.” She’s one of several elderly female characters, mostly widows, mostly living in an independent-living complex where they have settled into being a family of friends.

I know a tiny bit about this situation — my mom lives in a similar place, has a similar weekly game group and a similar bunch of friends, who deliver meals to each other, drive each other to hair and eye doctor appointments and bus as a group to plays and concerts. From what I can tell, O’Nan has depicted the comforts, joys and heartbreaks of this kind of situation with precision and compassion.

Those are hallmarks of all of O’Nan’s varied work, whether it’s the spellbinding, nonfiction “The Circus Fire” (about a deadly 1944 tragedy that altered insurance regulations) or novels such as the plague-in-Wisconsin “A Prayer for the Dying” or his bestselling elegy to the “created family” that exists in a Red Lobster restaurant, “Last Night at the Lobster.”

Loneliness is a factor in most of O’Nan’s books — it’s right there in the title of “Emily, Alone” — but they’re all about communities, how they come together and how they can fracture. Sad things happen in “Evensong,” including an accident that alters the life of the ringleader of the group of women and the death of another’s husband, but the beauty in the book is the instinctive way its characters care for one another, regardless of cost or difficulty (the woman whose husband dies doesn’t know how many feral cats are in her house but it’s in the dozens).

The book’s title, referring to nighttime church services that generally feature choral music, seems to compare the group’s four central members to a choir. “Evensong” offers the points of view of four of them, shifting between their voices (which, if I had a complaint about the book, are quite similar). Subtly, that structure makes clear that each of them has solo concerns but that it’s when they come together as a group that they become most powerful and beautiful.

In part, that’s because they need each other like members of a choir do. Nothing terrible happens to Arlene, 89, but, narrated from within her perspective, we experience a couple of the kinds of incidents — getting lost while driving a route she knows by heart, forgetting names of family members — that signal rough days ahead. O’Nan doesn’t round off the harsh edges of the women’s stories but, like Elizabeth Strout, he’s mostly interested in how people respond to the challenges that life inevitably tosses at them.

O’Nan’s writing is wise and wry. He pinpoints the absurdities of human behavior, like when the youngest of the women, Susie, can’t resist buying an Advent calendar for her cat, a purchase that she admits makes “absolutely no sense” and that she comes to regret. And his gently amusing dialogue sounds like real conversation, as when the women slyly make fun of their least favorite holiday carols (“‘It came upon a midnight clear,’” Emily said, and made a snoring noise).

There’s not a ton of plot in “Evensong,” which seems right for a book that’s mainly interested in showing us, in detail, how these women live. But O’Nan’s writing builds in power over the course of the book, ending as you’d expect an evensong service to conclude: with a prayer.

Evensong

By: Stewart O’Nan.

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press, 285 pages.

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