Kingsolver has long written socially, politically and environmentally alert novels that engage with the wider world and its complications and vulnerabilities, all the while rendering the specific, smaller worlds of her characters humane and resonant. In Unsheltered, she has given us another densely packed and intricately imagined book…Kingsolver's dual narrative works beautifully here. By giving us a family and a world teetering on the brink in 2016, and conveying a different but connected type of 19th-century teetering, Kingsolver eventually creates a sense not so much that history repeats itself, but that as humans we're inevitably connected through the possibility of collapse, whether it's the collapse of our houses, our bodies, logic, the social order or earth itself…As they stand beside each other in this engaged and absorbing novel, the two narratives reflect each other, reminding us of the dependability and adaptiveness of our drive toward survival.
Unsheltered
Narrated by Barbara Kingsolver
Barbara KingsolverUnabridged — 16 hours, 38 minutes
Unsheltered
Narrated by Barbara Kingsolver
Barbara KingsolverUnabridged — 16 hours, 38 minutes
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Overview
New York Times*Bestseller ¿ Named one of the Best Books of the Year by NPR, O: The Oprah Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek
“Kingsolver brilliantly captures both the price of profound change and how it can pave the way not only for future generations, but also for a radiant, unexpected expansion of the heart.”*-*O: The Oprah Magazine
The acclaimed author of The Poisonwood Bible and The Bean Trees, and recipient of numerous literary awards-including the National Humanities Medal, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the Orange Prize-returns with a story about two families, in two centuries, navigating what seems to be the end of the world as they know it. 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.
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. The magazine where Willa worked has folded; the college where her husband had tenure has closed. Their dubious shelter is also the only option for a disabled father-in-law and an exasperating, free-spirited daughter. 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.
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. 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. 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.
A timely and ""utterly captivating"" novel (San Francisco Chronicle), Unsheltered interweaves past and present to explore the human capacity for resiliency and compassion in times of great upheaval.
Editorial Reviews
★ 07/16/2018
Kingsolver's meticulously observed, elegantly structured novel unites social commentary with gripping storytelling. Its two intertwined narratives are set in Vineland, a real New Jersey town built as a utopian community in the 1860s. In the first storyline, set in the present, the magazine Willa Knox edited and the college at which her husband, Iano Tavoularis, taught both fold at the same time. They find themselves responsible for Iano's ailing father and their single son's new baby. They hope the house they have inherited in Vineland will help rebuild their finances, but—riddled with structural problems too costly to repair—it slowly collapses around them. Destitute after decades of striving and stunned by the racist presidential candidate upending America's ideals, the couple feels bewildered by the future facing them. Researching the home's past in the hopes of finding grant-worthy historical significance, Willa becomes fascinated by science teacher Thatcher Greenwood and his neighbor, naturalist Mary Treat, one of whom may have lived on the property in the 1870s. In the second story line, which alternates with Willa's, Thatcher's home is unsound and irreparable, too. His deepening bond with Mary inspires him, but his support for radical ideas like those of Mary's correspondent Charles Darwin infuriates Vineland's repressive leadership, threatening Thatcher's job and marriage. Kingsolver (Flight Behavior) artfully interweaves fictional and historical figures (notably the remarkable Mary Treat) and gives each narrative its own mood and voice without compromising their underlying unity. Containing both a rich story and a provocative depiction of times that shake the shelter of familiar beliefs, this novel shows Kingsolver at the top of her game. (Oct.)
Kingsolver’s dual narrative works beautifully. By giving us a family and a world teetering on the brink in 2016, and conveying a different but connected type of 19th-century teetering, Kingsolver creates a sense…that as humans we’re inevitably connected through the possibility of collapse, whether it’s the collapse of our houses, our bodies, logic, the social order or earth itself…In this engaged and absorbing novel, the two narratives reflect each other, reminding us of the dependability and adaptiveness of our drive toward survival.” — Meg Wolitzer, New York Times Book Review
“Utterly captivating…Keenly observed and thought-provoking…Kingsolver’s much-demonstrated talent for developing truly believable characters is, once again, on full display…Perhaps, more importantly, it’s the characters’ hardscrabble circumstances—especially in the modern story—that resonate right down to the bone.” — San Francisco Chronicle
“Kingsolver brilliantly captures both the price of profound change and how it can pave the way not only for future generations, but also for a radiant, unexpected expansion of the heart.” — O: The Oprah Magazine, 15 Best Books of 2018
“I felt almost bereft closing the cover on this book… With a spellbinding narrative and its exquisitely accurate evocation of two eras, Barbara Kingsolver’s novel is itself a shelter of sorts. One doesn’t want to leave it.” — Helen Klein Ross, Wall Street Journal
“Barbara Kingsolver’s latest novel, Unsheltered, will make you weep…But Kingsolver is also downright hilarious…Unsheltered is also a sociopolitical novel tackling real-world issues, especially how we humans navigate profound changes that threaten to unmoor us.” — O, the Oprah Magazine
“Barbara Kingsolver does something amazing in her new novel…Uncovering and appreciating the connections between the two stories, historical and contemporary, is the best reason to read the book…Both stories are compelling as Thatcher and Willa lead their families during dangerously uncertain times.” — Associated Press
“UNSHELTERED’s title suggests a roof gone missing. But it’s also a resonant call to be more alert to our social predicaments, to ‘stand in the clear light of day.’” — USA Today
“Unsheltered is a skillful blend of fact and fiction told in alternating chapters... It’s a winner all the way…an absolute giant of a book.” — New York Journal of Books
“Nuanced and convincing…Engrossing.” — Jane Ciabattari, BBC News “Preview”
“Sophisticated storytelling, compelling characters and sharp humor…Kingsolver is a writer who can help us understand and navigate the chaos of these times.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Kingsolver’s meticulously observed, elegantly structured novel unites social commentary with gripping storytelling…Containing both a rich story and a provocative depiction of times that shake the shelter of familiar beliefs, this novel shows Kingsolver at the top of her game.” — Publishers Weekly (Boxed and Starred review)
“As always, Kingsolver gives readers plenty to think about. Her warm humanism coupled with an unabashed point of view make her a fine 21st-century exponent of the honorable tradition of politically engaged fiction.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Exceptionally involving and rewarding…There is much to delight in and think about while reveling in Kingsolver’s vital characters, quicksilver dialogue, intimate moments, dramatic showdowns, and lushly realized milieus…An enveloping, tender, witty, and awakening novel of love and trauma, family and survival, moral dilemmas and intellectual challenges…” — Booklist (starred review)
“Riveting…A tour de force of fiction…about this dynamic conflict between individual expression and communal belonging...One of the most magical parts of UNSHELTERED is how Kingsolver skillfully blends her two narratives into one unified tale, with past and present repeatedly mirroring each other.” — BookPage
“Powerful.” — Book Riot
“A return to the more ambitious, grand scale of novels such as The Lacuna and The Poisonwood Bible…A lively and vividly peopled novel of ideas…Clear throughout the novel is a tension between self-reliance and interdependence.” — The Guardian (feature)
Unsheltered is a skillful blend of fact and fiction told in alternating chapters... It’s a winner all the way…an absolute giant of a book.”
I felt almost bereft closing the cover on this book… With a spellbinding narrative and its exquisitely accurate evocation of two eras, Barbara Kingsolver’s novel is itself a shelter of sorts. One doesn’t want to leave it.
Sophisticated storytelling, compelling characters and sharp humor…Kingsolver is a writer who can help us understand and navigate the chaos of these times.
Barbara Kingsolver does something amazing in her new novel…Uncovering and appreciating the connections between the two stories, historical and contemporary, is the best reason to read the book…Both stories are compelling as Thatcher and Willa lead their families during dangerously uncertain times.”
UNSHELTERED’s title suggests a roof gone missing. But it’s also a resonant call to be more alert to our social predicaments, to ‘stand in the clear light of day.’
Utterly captivating…Keenly observed and thought-provoking…Kingsolver’s much-demonstrated talent for developing truly believable characters is, once again, on full display…Perhaps, more importantly, it’s the characters’ hardscrabble circumstances—especially in the modern story—that resonate right down to the bone.
Nuanced and convincing…Engrossing.
Kingsolver’s dual narrative works beautifully. By giving us a family and a world teetering on the brink in 2016, and conveying a different but connected type of 19th-century teetering, Kingsolver creates a sense…that as humans we’re inevitably connected through the possibility of collapse, whether it’s the collapse of our houses, our bodies, logic, the social order or earth itself…In this engaged and absorbing novel, the two narratives reflect each other, reminding us of the dependability and adaptiveness of our drive toward survival.
Barbara Kingsolver’s latest novel, Unsheltered, will make you weep…But Kingsolver is also downright hilarious…Unsheltered is also a sociopolitical novel tackling real-world issues, especially how we humans navigate profound changes that threaten to unmoor us.
Kingsolver brilliantly captures both the price of profound change and how it can pave the way not only for future generations, but also for a radiant, unexpected expansion of the heart.
Powerful.
A return to the more ambitious, grand scale of novels such as The Lacuna and The Poisonwood Bible…A lively and vividly peopled novel of ideas…Clear throughout the novel is a tension between self-reliance and interdependence.
Exceptionally involving and rewarding…There is much to delight in and think about while reveling in Kingsolver’s vital characters, quicksilver dialogue, intimate moments, dramatic showdowns, and lushly realized milieus…An enveloping, tender, witty, and awakening novel of love and trauma, family and survival, moral dilemmas and intellectual challenges…
Riveting…A tour de force of fiction…about this dynamic conflict between individual expression and communal belonging...One of the most magical parts of UNSHELTERED is how Kingsolver skillfully blends her two narratives into one unified tale, with past and present repeatedly mirroring each other.”
UNSHELTERED’s title suggests a roof gone missing. But it’s also a resonant call to be more alert to our social predicaments, to ‘stand in the clear light of day.’
Utterly captivating…Keenly observed and thought-provoking…Kingsolver’s much-demonstrated talent for developing truly believable characters is, once again, on full display…Perhaps, more importantly, it’s the characters’ hardscrabble circumstances—especially in the modern story—that resonate right down to the bone.
Kingsolver brilliantly captures both the price of profound change and how it can pave the way not only for future generations, but also for a radiant, unexpected expansion of the heart.
Barbara Kingsolver does something amazing in her new novel…Uncovering and appreciating the connections between the two stories, historical and contemporary, is the best reason to read the book…Both stories are compelling as Thatcher and Willa lead their families during dangerously uncertain times.”
Unlike the house in Vineland, a fictional town in New Jersey, Kingsolver’s magnificent edifice of a novel is far more securely constructed…Kingsolver likes a big canvas, room for her characters to grow and change, her luxurious prose and flashes of humor lightening her forceful political arguments…Readers will be drawn to the novel precisely for this, the richness with which Kingsolver captures the Trump era and the choices it forces on ordinary Americans, the ways in which thoughtful speech can become a kind of shelter when all else is lost…The wisdom Unsheltered offers is wry, hard-wrested and timeless, good balm when even the roof over your head seems shaky.
Thank God for Barbara Kingsolver, one of America’s hardiest novelists…Unsheltered is a gripping novel of two multigenerational households…that find themselves in poorly constructed dwellings on faulty foundations, during a time of sweeping cultural and historical change…One way that Kingsolver suggests that we move forward in this new unsteady present is to study and own our past.
Allegorical UNSHELTERED ties the post-Civil War era to that of Trump…There’s hard-won wisdom here, and profound doubt as to where our future is taking us. Kingsolver’s voice is urgent, eloquent, wily…Her contemporary narrative is laced with wry, genial humor and the 1870s half of her tale is a gripping study of how battling schools of thought can destroy personal lives.
A powerful lament for the American dream…A crumbling house is a solid foundation for this striking, time-shifting tale of a nation adrift…Kingsolver powerfully evokes the eeriness of living through times of social turmoil…She has proved herself a supreme craftsperson…possessing a knack for ingenious metaphors that encapsulate the social questions at the heart of her stories…As a work of socially engaged fiction, Unsheltered makes a decent case for escapism.
The first major novel to tackle the Trump era straight on and place it in the larger chronicle of existential threats…140 years apart, these alternating stories about Willa and Thatcher maintain their distinctive tones but echo one another in curious provocative ways. Kingsolver suggests it’s never been easy to find oneself unsheltered, cast out from the comforts of old beliefs about how the world works…We’ve adapted before. With a little creative thinking and courage, we might do so again.
Playing with layered meanings of shelter, author, and, here, narrator, Barbara Kingsolver weaves the stories of two families tied to the same house in Vineland, New Jersey, across two centuries. In the present day, Willa copes with the aftermath of the unexpected loss of her daughter-in-law, adding additional burden to a family barely getting by. In the late nineteenth century, Thatcher returns to his wife's ancestral homeland for a teaching position. Each family struggles to rise above the economic and psychological barriers of its time. The parallels are striking, often dispiriting. Marred at the outset by a background echo, Kingsolver's performance is imperfect and uneven, though still worthwhile. Her warm, lightly accented voice with its natural emotional pull is effectively applied in her performances of the female characters. A.S. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
★ 2018-07-02
Alternating between two centuries, Kingsolver (Flight Behavior, 2012, etc.) examines the personal and social shocks that ensue when people's assumptions about the world and their place in it are challenged.The magazine Willa Knox worked for went broke, and so did the college where her husband, Iano, had tenure, destroying the market value of their Virginia home, which stood on college land. They should be grateful to have inherited a house in Vineland, New Jersey, just a half-hour commute from Iano's new, non-tenured one-year gig, except it's falling apart, and they have been abruptly saddled with son Zeke's infant after his girlfriend commits suicide. In the same town during Ulysses Grant's presidency, science teacher Thatcher Greenwood is also grappling with a house he can't afford to repair as well as a headmaster hostile to his wish to discuss Darwin's theory of evolution with his students and a young wife interested only in social climbing. While Willa strives to understand how her comfortable middle-class life could have vanished overnight, her 26-year-old daughter, Tig, matter-of-factly sees both her mother's disbelief and her Greek-immigrant grandfather Nick's racist diatribes and hearty approval of presidential candidate Donald Trump as symptoms of a dying culture of entitlement and unbridled consumption. Lest this all sound schematic, Kingsolver has enfolded her political themes in two dramas of family conflict with full-bodied characters, including Mary Treat, a real-life 19th-century biologist enlisted here as the fictional friend and intellectual support of beleaguered Thatcher. Sexy, mildly feckless Iano and Thatcher's feisty sister-in-law, Polly, are particularly well-drawn subsidiary figures, and Willa's doubts and confusion make her the appealing center of the 21st-century story. The paired conclusions, although hardly cheerful, see hope in the indomitable human instinct for survival. Nonetheless, the words that haunt are Tig's judgment on blinkered America: "All the rules have changed and it's hard to watch people keep carrying on just the same, like it's business as usual."As always, Kingsolver gives readers plenty to think about. Her warm humanism coupled with an unabashed point of view make her a fine 21st-century exponent of the honorable tradition of politically engaged fiction.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940170384372 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins Publishers |
| Publication date: | 10/16/2018 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
| Sales rank: | 463,592 |
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