Description
Temporarily out of stock
Title: Unsheltered
Author: KINGSOLVER BARBARA
Format: PAPERBACK
Publication date: 16/10/2018
Imprint: FABER & FABER
Price: $13.99
Publishing status: Active
Writing in the New York Times, novelist
Meg Wolitzer describes Unsheltered as a
‘densely packed and intricately imagined
book…about a world that we keep befouling
through ignorance, greed or incompetence’.
Kingsolver’s masterfully constructed dual
narrative focuses on two families – one
in the 19th century and the other in the
present day – who live in the same house in
Vineland, New Jersey. Originally established
as a utopian community, Vineland in the 21st
century is anything but, and Kingsolver (The
Poisonwood Bible) constructs a powerful
metaphor about the problems of modernday
America from this story of a once grand,
but now almost derelict house.
Willa Knox has always prided herself on being the embodiment of responsibility for her family. Which is why it’s so unnerving that she’s arrived at middle age with nothing to show for her hard work and dedication but a stack of unpaid bills and an inherited brick home in Vineland, New Jersey, that is literally falling apart. The magazine where she worked has folded, and the college where her husband had tenure has closed. The dilapidated house is also home to her ailing and cantankerous Greek father-in-law and her two grown children: her stubborn, free-spirited daughter, Tig, and her dutiful debt-ridden, ivy educated son, Zeke, who has arrived with his unplanned baby in the wake of a life-shattering development. In an act of desperation, Willa begins to investigate the history of her home, hoping that the local historical preservation society might take an interest and provide funding for its direly needed repairs. Through her research into Vineland’s past and its creation as a Utopian community, she discovers a kindred spirit from the 1880s, Thatcher Greenwood. A science teacher with a lifelong passion for honest investigation, Thatcher finds himself under siege in his community for telling the truth: his employer forbids him to speak of the exciting new theory recently published by Charles Darwin. Thatcher’s friendships with a brilliant woman scientist and a renegade newspaper editor draw him into a vendetta with the town’s most powerful men. At home, his new wife and status-conscious mother-in-law bristle at the risk of scandal, and dismiss his financial worries and the news that their elegant house is structurally unsound.
ISBN: 9780571347018