Synopsis

Willa Knox did everything right. And yet here she is at middle age: the magazine she worked for has folded, her husband's tenured position has evaporated along with the college that offered it, her inherited house in Vineland, New Jersey is structurally unsound, and her family—a cantankerous father-in-law, a free-spirited daughter, and a debt-laden son who has just arrived with an unplanned baby—are all looking to her for answers she doesn't have.

In desperation, Willa begins researching the history of her crumbling house, hoping the local historical preservation society might fund its repairs. What she finds is Thatcher Greenwood—a science teacher who lived at the same address in the 1880s, fighting his own impossible battle: his employer has forbidden him to teach Darwin's theories, the town's most powerful men have turned against him, and his own house, like Willa's, is falling apart.

Told in alternating chapters across two centuries, Unsheltered is Barbara Kingsolver's meditation on what it means to live through a world in upheaval—and where shelter can still be found when the structures we relied on give way.