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

She heaved herself up and went downstairs, rousing Dixie from her nap on the front hall rug, clipping on her leash and urging her out the door for a walk. Dixie, with the help of expensive doggie Prozac, had conquered a lifelong terror of car travel and coped with the move from Virginia, but now wanted to spend her remaining days sleeping off the dismay. Willa saw the merits of that program.

"Easy does it," she coached, wondering what Dixie's old eyes were making of these Vineland sidewalks that were broken everywhere, heaved up by the bunions of giant old trees. Every street offered a similar view of oak and maple trunks lined up like columns of the Parthenon. The contractor's Utopia story made sense insofar as these trees suggested some thorough city planning over a century ago. She passed in front of the neighbor's house with its generous corner lot fully planted in autos, then turned south on Sixth and made tedious progress as Dixie inspected every tree trunk. The dog was finicky about emptying her bladder but eager to sniff out the local news, seeming to think it differed from yesterday's. Like the elderly Vinelanders Willa saw in diner booths poring over the town's weekly, as if something might have happened here since the last issue.

She crossed Landis Avenue, a bizarrely supersized main street, the width of a four-lane freeway at least. Iano had posed various entertaining theories, but the truth turned out to be mundane: Land Baron Landis laid out a namesake street to match his ego. He might as well have paved the place in gold. He should see his dying little burg now, with its main drag so deserted Willa felt safe taking out her phone to check the time as she and her legally blind dog casually jaywalked.

She wanted to call Iano with the new installment of their family disaster so he could share her sensation of drowning. But he would be on his way home by now, and Iano was a highly distractible driver. Really it was her mother she'd wanted to call right after the bad news, or in the middle of it, while Mr. Petrofaccio was blowing his nose. First thing in the morning, last thing at night, whenever a fight with Tig left her in pieces, it was her mother who put Willa back together. When someone mattered like that, you didn't lose them at their death. You lost them as you kept living.

She passed a pawn shop, the Welfare Office, a Thai restaurant and the Number One Chinese Market before heading south again. After five leafy residential blocks, at the corner of Eighth and Quince, Dixie finally elected to pee on the foot of a maple. Most of the houses on this block dated from about the same Victorian era, variously run down, two for sale. And sure enough, she spotted two garage-like buildings in the backyards, identical in design, disguised by years of divergent use: one sheltered a Honda sedan, the other was an epic man-cave covered with old license plates. She pressed her brain for a second to recall the word, then got it: Stip. Stipulation houses. Quickie predecessors of more carefully constructed mansions that were now coming due for collapse.

Dixie waddled homeward and Willa followed, feeling the word shambles in her sternum. How could two hardworking people do everything right in life and arrive in their fifties essentially destitute? She felt angry at Iano for some infraction that wouldn't hold up to scrutiny, she knew. His serial failures at job security? Not his fault. Plenty of academics spent their careers chasing tenure from city to town. They were a new class of educated nomads, raising kids with no real answer to the question of where they'd grown up. Doing homework in a hallway outside a faculty meeting, that's where. Playing tag with the offspring of physicists and art historians on some dean's lawn while the adults swigged cheap Chablis and exchanged companionable gripes about their department heads. Now, without complaint, Iano had taken a teaching position that was an insult to someone with his credentials. As the family's sole surviving breadwinner, he should get a pass on the charge of being unfit to take a tough phone call while driving.

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.