With history as their tantalizing canvas, these characters paint a startlingly relevant portrait of life in precarious times when the foundations of the past have failed to prepare us for the future. In her latest novel, Unsheltered (Harper Collins, 2018), Barbara Kingsolver pokes a sharp pen deep into the nest of the American dream, stirring up a mound of undelivered promises and discontented characters who scurry about like angry ants. Unsheltered is the compulsively readable story of two families, in two centuries, who live at the corner of Sixth and Plum in Vineland, New Jersey, navigating what seems to be the end of the world as they know it. In a village ostensibly founded as a benevolent Utopia, Thatcher wants only to honor his duties, but his friendships with a woman scientist and a renegade newspaper editor threaten to draw him into a vendetta with the town’s powerful men.

His young bride and social-climbing mother-in-law bristle at the risk of scandal, and dismiss his worries that their elegant house is unsound. Her latest, Unsheltered, is also a sociopolitical novel tackling real-world issues, especially how we humans navigate profound changes that threaten to unmoor us. In another time, a troubled husband and public servant asks, How can a man tell the truth, and be reviled for it? A science teacher with a passion for honest investigation, Thatcher Greenwood finds himself under siege: his employer forbids him to speak of the exciting work just published by Charles Darwin. The Poisonwood Bible, her 1998 masterpiece about a missionary’s destructive hypocrisy, was an Oprah’s Book Club pick and sold more than four million copies. When the family’s one success story, an Ivy-educated son, is uprooted by tragedy he seems likely to join them, with dark complications of his own. Their dubious shelter is also the only option for a disabled father-in-law and an exasperating, free-spirited daughter. The magazine where Willa worked has folded the college where her husband had tenure has closed. How could two hardworking people do everything right in life, a woman asks, and end up destitute? Willa Knox and her husband followed all the rules as responsible parents and professionals, and have nothing to show for it but debts and an inherited brick house that is falling apart.

Unsheltered by barbara kingsolver