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

God, she thought. Aldus. A few weeks in the world, now this.

"I'm sitting on the couch," Zeke said, seeming now to want to produce words. "He's lying beside me, asleep. I guess it wore him out, waiting so long for… He was so hungry. And scared, I think. Jesus. How can he not ever know his mother? What does that do to a person?"

"I guess we take this an hour at a time, and right now you shouldn't be alone. As soon as we're off the phone, call somebody. I don't mean the coroner, I want you to have a friend there. Gosh, Helene's poor parents. How long will it take them to get to Boston?"

The sound he made startled her, an animal moan. The impossible task of calling them had not yet occurred to him.

"Do you want me to talk to them?"

"You've never met them. How would that feel, this, coming from a stranger?"

"Okay, but please get somebody there to be with you. You'll have to decide a lot of things. When Mama died I was shocked at all the practical stuff that has to happen immediately. Do you have any idea about… what she would want?"

She listened to Zeke's breathing as it caught in a sob, tried and caught again, like a halting engine. "We didn't talk about that, Mom," he managed. "When the subject of death came up, it was me telling her not to do it."

"What do you mean?" She turned around but Iano was gone. She stepped to the doorway and looked into the dining room. Tig was playing backgammon with Nick so he wouldn't throw a tantrum while he waited for dinner. They made an impossible pair facing off across the table: pixie Tig with her springy dreadlocks, hulking Nick with the oxygen tubes pressing his jowls in a permanent grimace.

"This morning she seemed, just, normal," Zeke was saying. "She took the baby for his checkup yesterday and was relieved he's, you know. Fine. Gaining weight. Today she was going to take him out in the stroller. We joked about whether she needed an owner's manual to drive it."

Willa was amazed at his coherence. People handled emergencies in many ways, she'd covered enough crime scenes to know, but they fell back on the habit of self. This reasonable, desperately sad man on the phone was the bare wood of her son beneath the bark. Willa saw her pasta water was boiling over. She clicked off the burner. "You said when death came up it was you telling her not to do it. What does that mean, Zeke?"

"I didn't even kiss her goodbye, Mom. I mean, maybe I did, without knowing it. I can't even remember. That's so sad."

"Are you telling me she had threatened suicide?"

"She should never have gone off the antidepressants. I shouldn't have let her. Nobody should have asked her to do that."

"Don't blame yourself. The drugs were not your call. There must have been risks to the baby. What was she taking?"

"Paroxetine was the one they said she really needed to get away from. They tried her on Sarafem, I think, I don't remember exactly. They okayed some things after the first trimester but nothing ever worked, once she'd gone cold turkey. She was, like, paralyzed with fear about doing the wrong thing. They have black box warnings on those drugs, Mom. How could she look in the mirror, pregnant, and take a medicine like that? A black box is like 'smoking gives you cancer,' that extreme level of warning."

Willa felt the weight of Helene transgressions she should have forgiven. The pregnancy whining, the lethargy. "I'm sorry. This must have been so hard for you."

"It was harder for her. Obviously."

"I'm sure you didn't tell her to stop taking her antidepressants."

"Maybe I expected too much from her. I do that, Mom, I feel like when things seem easy to me, they should be easy for other people. Maybe she felt guilty."

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.