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

"Right." Pete offered her a business card and a condolent handshake. She already knew her gregarious husband would collect this man as a pal. All their married life she'd watched Iano swap phone numbers with plumbers and oil-changers, the born Facebook-friender, long before Facebook.

"We'll call you about the next step after I break the bad news. But I'll warn you, my husband is also going to give you a bunch of reasons why we can't tear down the house. And they're not all the same as mine. Between us we can filibuster you."

Mr. Petrofaccio nodded. "All due respect? I hear that kind of thing all the time. It does not ever get the house fixed."



Willa spent a restless hour walking around the empty third floor trying to choose a room for her office. After a month in the house she'd gotten things decently organized downstairs but had made no inroads on the top story except for the room she'd nominated as an attic. Alongside the antique crib she'd stashed the usual junk, holiday decorations, underemployed sports equipment, plus boxes of the kids' keepsakes stretching from preschool finger paintings to Tig's wacked out Science Fair posters and Zeke's high school yearbooks signed by all the girls who'd found him 2 cute 2 be 4gotten.

Willa now recalled the contractor's reason for stepping behind the stuff: to inspect ruptured ductwork? Christ. It sounded like an aneurism. What shook her was his cheerful demeanor as he delivered the awful prognosis. Exactly like her mother's last oncologist.

To steer out of a tailspin she staked her claim on the room that looked down on the automotive neighbors. A view to avoid, some might say, but the leafy afternoon light through the giant beech was gorgeous. And the hardwood floor was in pretty good shape except for the scarred, grayish path that ran the circuit of the four connected third-floor rooms. She remembered Zeke and Tig and one of their now-dead dogs chasing each other through a circular floor plan like this in one of their homes. Which one? Boulder, she thought, recalling mountains out the kitchen window. Hills to which she'd craved to flee, stuck at home with two preschoolers while Iano laboriously blew his first shot at tenure.

These top floor rooms heated up like a furnace. All the windows in the house reached from floor to ceiling, and most so far had proven unopenable. She leveled a couple of kicks at a frame before giving up, then sat on the floor and unpacked a box of her books into categorical piles. Then angrily repacked them. Nesting was ludicrous, given the doomed state of the nest. She closed her eyes and leaned back against the wall, feeling the rhythmic thrum of Nick's oxygen compressor on the first floor. Lest she ever relax into solitude, the miasma of her father-in-law and his life support suffused the household. She wished Iano were home. Classes didn't begin for several weeks but already he had pressing duties galore at his new office.

The word "office" plucked a pang of nostalgia in her chest. Given her age and profession – mid-fifties, journalist – she might never again have a working life with colleagues, office gossip, and a regular incentive to get out of sweatpants. The remainder of her productive life revoked overnight felt like an amputation. In her last years at the magazine, the commutes to the outskirts of D.C. had consumed so much life force she'd started envying her friends who were going freelance. Of this envy Willa was cured in no time flat. Now she understood an office had made her official. Her whole career was thrown into doubt retroactively. Did a professional wake up one day with no profession? For sanity's sake she needed to send out some freelance proposals, and step one was to claim a room of her own. Now even that simple project was tainted with calamity.

She lay on the floor and stared at the concentric brown stains on the ceiling. Iano had proposed they paint over the stain and forget it, because he was Iano. Willa felt that if timbers up there were leaking their dark fluids, the trouble must run deep enough to warrant calling a contractor. Some tin would need patching, maybe they'd find rot in the roof beams. But the whole house a shambles? The shock settled on Willa as a personal failure. As if she'd invited the disaster by failing to see it coming.

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.