Excerpt from Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"You look around this town you'll see a few, all built on the same plan. Trusses like a barn, fast and cheap. Some guy was doing well in the stip-house business I figure."

"What era are we talking about?"

"Landis," he replied. "You don't know about Landis?"

"He's what, some real estate developer?"

"A king more like, back in the day. This is just a bunch of wild wilderness when he buys it, right? Thirty thousand acres and nobody but Indians and runaway slaves. So he makes this big plan to get people to come. Heaven on earth kind of thing."

"One of those Utopian communities? You're kidding me."

"I am not. Farms like a picture book. You notice the streets are Plum Peach Apple and all like that? Almond?" He pronounced it owl-mond. She also noted his resistance to contractions, and the recurrent back inna day. She wished for her pocket tape recorder.

"Yeah, I noticed. My daughter goes out to walk the dog and comes home wanting a snack."

Pete laughed. "Sounds like some healthy kid. All my girls want are those Sour Patch things and the diet pop. I am gonna tell you, it drives the wife crazy."

Willa had no intention of trying to explain Tig. "So he named it Vineland thinking people would swarm around like fruit flies?"

"Captain Landis was all about the fruit, is what I know. And who knows how to grow grapes but the Italians? So he starts up his own newspaper in the Italian language for attracting the right element. The Petrofaccios came from Palermo, Italy. My nonnie kept a scrapbook of that stuff."

Willa smiled. "Landis was a wino."

"No ma'am, that is the crazy thing, there was no drinking alcohol in Vineland whatsoever. That was a very significant rule, back in the day."

Willa saw holes in this story but still might look into it for a feature: Nineteenth Century Utopias Gone to Hell. "You're sure the garage is theirs? Not that I need it." She laughed. "Unless you think we'll need a new place to live."

Unnervingly, he didn't laugh. "It's theirs. I can tell by the angle and the setback."

She assumed the neighbors didn't know this, or it would be crammed with collateral debris from their garden of broken cars. Pete gave their peeling ranch house a once-over. "Original structure came and went. That is a shame. Those originals were some beautiful old girls in their day. Like yours."

"Except for her weak foundation. The ruin of many a girl, I guess."

Pete looked at her, evidently finding this unsuitable material for a joke.

"If it's such a shame to lose them, shouldn't ours be saved? Isn't there grant money for this kind of thing? Historic preservation?"

He shrugged. "Our fair city has got real empty pockets at this moment in time."

"They must have been loaded at some point. It sounds like this place was built on an immigrant work ethic and old money coming out of the woodwork."

"Money," Mr. Petrofaccio said, staring over the dead Fords and Chevys at two girls pushing babies in strollers down the gravel alley, conversing in a musical Asian language. "Where does it all go?"

Willa had been asking the same question. In her family, in her profession and her husband's, in strained European economies and the whole damned world, where is the cash that once there was? Her husband had a Ph.D. in global politics, her son was an economist, and neither of them seemed all that interested in this mystery that plagued her. Not as it specifically applied.

"That would be the thing here, government money," Pete offered. "Because no ordinary residential person is going to have what it takes here. There is a time for propping things up, and then there is past time."

Willa exhaled. "Okay. This isn't the straightforward consultation I expected. I think you're saying we only have stopgap measures, and none of them looks very good. I guess we'd better schedule another meeting when my husband can be here."

Excerpted from Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver. Copyright © 2018 by Barbara Kingsolver. Excerpted by permission of Harper. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.