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

Their marital status hadn't initially mattered to Iano and Willa, tradition-agnostic baby boomers that they were. Cohabitation was normal. But once the pregnancy seemed here to stay, Iano thought his chivalrous son would insist on marrying the mother of his child. Iano was wrong: these kids found marriage uninteresting in legal or sentimental terms. Helene was an attorney, Zeke explained, who didn't need a boilerplate contract written by the state of Massachusetts to govern her personal life. Chivalry wasn't dead, it's just that men didn't own all the horses anymore, and women of Helene's ilk didn't need that kind of rescue. Here in Zeke's private sphere, Willa was getting the picture.

She felt at a loss to console him as he waded through his swamp of grief, hour by hour, while she watched from the outside. But she wouldn't be anywhere else, and couldn't remember the last time they'd spent more than an hour together, just the two of them. On family visits the sibling bickering and Iano's ebullience used up all the oxygen. These quiet days in his apartment were different. Willa could not have borne the admission that she preferred her son to her daughter, but there was no question which one she'd found easier to love. Easily born, easily reared, he'd grown into a temperament so similar to hers, Willa lost track of the boundaries between them. People remarked on his resemblance to his father, and superficially it was true: he had the height and shoulders, the trustworthy wide-set eyes. "Molded in the image of his papa," the Greek relatives gushed each time they saw Zeke, and Willa wouldn't argue – she loved the mold. The shape of her husband in a doorway could still bump her heart. But Zeke's ash blond coloring was all Willa's, and so was everything inside: a handsome Greek mold filled with the pale Saxon stuff of a duty-bound maternal line.

Tig was the opposite, small and fine-boned like Willa, the same high eyebrows and pointed chin, but with dark eyes peering out from an interior that boiled with her father's energy. They'd called her "Antsy" from infancy because Antigone fit better on a birth certificate than on an actual child – no surprise to Willa. The nickname was exactly right; the girl had ants in her pants. In high school she'd fought her way back to Antigone but her friends collapsed it to Tigger, then just Tig. No one called her Antigone now except occasionally Iano, the responsible party, still trying to make good on it.

Willa missed Iano badly but hadn't called home since the day of the funeral. There was too much to tell and Iano seemed almost willfully resistant to getting it. He was looking for some Greek-tragic vindication, still airing his thoughts about the pregnancy having been a bad idea, while here was Aldus installed in the living room, bassinette and changing table on either side of the TV. Well beyond the idea stage.

She finished the night stand and moved on without pause. The bathroom held a confounding array of skin-rejuvenating products for a beautiful girl in her twenties. Willa dumped it all into trash bags after wondering briefly if it would be awful to keep some of the expensive night creams. She tried not to read prescription bottles as she tossed those as well. Zeke was in the second bedroom where Helene had set up her study, pending the need for a nursery. It was still a study, despite the accomplished birth. Helene had done nothing to implement a transition, no pastel colors or mobiles, these happy things mothers do to lure babies into the world. In an apartment suffused with mourning, Willa found this non-nursery the most unbearable place, but only because she knew about normal motherhood. It's nearly always women who lead men into babyland, urging them to get serious about names and nursery themes. Zeke couldn't know what he'd missed.

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.