Fiction Unsheltered

Barbara Kingsolver (Faber, £20)

This weighty and politically engaged novel is written as two stories in parallel. in 2016, circumstances have forced willa Knox to move to a dilapidated house in Vineland, New Jersey, struggling to comprehend her family’s sudden poverty: ‘how could two hardworking people do everything right in life and arrive in their fifties essentially destitute?’ in 1871, Thatcher greenwood moves to the same location to teach science at the local school, where his Darwinism goes against the Creationist beliefs of the tyrannical men in charge.

The author invites her readers to draw links between the two stories, explicitly binding them: the final words of a chapter double as the heading for the next. Both narratives engage with the terror of becoming ‘unsheltered’ as one’s home collapses and—taking this metaphorically—ask what we do when foundations give way.

The treasure at the heart of this book is self-taught scientist Mary Treat, Thatcher’s neighbour-soonto-be-friend, who does experiments such as watching spiders build beautiful miniature houses and encouraging a Venus flytrap to digest the end of her finger; her work resurfaces when willa delves into Vineland’s history, looking for funding to restore her house.

willa envies Mary and Thatcher for being ‘born under the moon of a paradigm shift… present to a world turning over on itself.’ The author, a former scientist, shows climate change to be today’s paradigm shift, as momentous as the advent of Darwinism, ‘when biologists were discovering new species right and left, not watching them go extinct’.

hope is offered in willa’s daughter, embodying the eco-friendly, community-minded future—of car-shares and bring-your-owncup parties. The author puts us in a Darwinian frame of mind to leave us wondering if this breed of human is sufficiently welladapted to survive what’s coming. Emily Rhodes