![]() In early 2016, in the last months of Obama’s presidency, Willa Knox, a once gainfully employed, now stutteringly freelance journalist, and her academic husband Iano, who has spent his career vainly chasing tenure, inherit a dilapidated late-19th-century house near the college where Iano has secured a 12-month contract. In fact, Unsheltered contains not just one disintegrating house but two, built on the same plot of land in New Jersey and housing two different families 150 years apart. Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel is clearly inspired by the crisis of Trump’s America, but it is also about what it might mean to live when previously trusted ideologies or economic systems are challenged to breaking point, and what might follow in their wake. When the novel’s title is Unsheltered, you’ve got an unambiguous statement of intent. ![]() When a family in a novel moves into a house that’s starting to fall down, you can bet money there’s a metaphor in there somewhere. ![]()
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