Iano’s father Nick’s health is failing quickly, but Willa must painfully argue with their medical insurers to get the treatment he needs. After a great tragedy their adult son Zeke who is a Harvard Business School graduate is left with an infant to care for on his own. Iano is a teacher at a university but he’s been unable to secure tenure. The storyline that takes place near our present time focuses on a freelance journalist named Willa Knox whose family is on the brink of poverty despite the fact she and her husband Iano have worked hard their whole lives. What Kingsolver seems particularly concerned in showing in this novel is the gradual disappearance of the middle class of America. So often books circumvent financial concerns by portraying privileged characters or they simply don’t address the issue at all. I always find stories that frankly address the way average people must grapple with money trouble to be especially moving. What’s always so brilliant about Kingsolver’s writing is the depth of humanity she instils in her characters so that they feel very real and heartfelt. Through this Kingsolver creates a poignant dialogue with the past to show how some things change and others remain the same on both a personal and political level as society advances and evolves. We follow the people who inhabit this plot of land in different centuries as they struggle with financial worries, reactionary politics and fractious family life. However, both stories are set within the same house in the community of Vineland. The novel has two storylines woven together in alternating chapters that switch back and forth between the years 18. It’s been six years since then and her new novel “Unsheltered” also has environmental issues at its heart, but takes a different angle. When Barbara Kingsolver’s excellent previous novel “Flight Behaviour” was published I remember her describing in an interview how she couldn’t imagine not addressing environmental concerns in her writing given the state of global warming.

Unsheltered by barbara kingsolver