The families in Carol Windley’s remarkable story collection are as unsettled and moody as the wind-blasted landscape that shelters and confounds them.

Set in the Pacific Northwest — mostly on Vancouver Island, where Windley lives — “Home Schooling” (Atlantic Monthly, $22) is the Canadian author’s U.S. debut, a haunting book that deserves our attention. There are faint echoes of Alice Munro, that Canadian genius of the short story, in Windley’s work. If Windley isn’t quite so artful as Munro in story structure, she is deeply in tune with her characters, their dilemmas, their petulance and the peculiar grace that allows them to accept, even sometimes to applaud, how far they’ve come.

Windley can create an almost tactile atmosphere of uncertainty and dread. She sets an ominous tone immediately in “What Saffi Knows,” in which a “vigilant parent” recalls a terrible childhood secret and her failure to expose it: “That summer a boy went missing from a field known as the old potato farm, although no one could remember anything growing there but wild meadow barley, thistles in their multitudes, black lilies with a stink of rotten meat if you brought your face too close or tried to pick them up.”

Other dark deeds rise in these often-troubling stories. In “The Reading Elvis” a teacher distracted by an old love allows his wife’s dogs to roam free and finds himself in trouble when he finally sets out to find them. A young woman struggles with the truth of her family legacy in “Sand and Frost”: Her grandmother Pauline’s father, “the Reverend Elliot Saunders, had one day come home with a gun,” shot her mother, brother and sister, then himself. “When it was finished, no one but Pauline survived.”

Accidental tragedy is also a villain: In the title story, a school shuts down in the wake of a boy’s drowning, leaving the father of three who runs the institution lost. “They accused Harold of incompetence, misconduct, negligence. Harold reeled. A cold wind stirred the trees; rain began to fall.”

But Windley’s protagonists — most of whom are young, small-town women — are resilient. Nadia of “Family in Black” weathers her parents’ split and her mother’s remarriage to a rich man. The mother and daughter in “Felt Skies,” at odds over the daughter’s relationship with an older man, manage to preserve a bond. Marisa in “Children’s Games” endures babysitting her boyfriend’s recalcitrant child while he attends workshops at a “human development center” for “Healing the Family” week. He’s attempting to get over his wife’s desertion. Hard work, but Marisa’s journey has been equally arduous.

Most telling, though, may be “The Joy of Life,” which details the ways in which we write our stories through the unexpected turns our lives take. Our futures can be as wild and unpredictable as the waves crashing in from the Pacific, Windley tells us. Our destinies are uncertain despite our pasts, as our ties to other people steer a course of surprise and, sometimes, eventual contentment.