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

"I'm sure her doctors advised her. Knowing Helene, she was well informed."

"But what kind of choice did she have? You can't imagine what she's been through. Every day of the pregnancy was hell. She was obsessed with the idea that something was wrong, the baby was dead, or deformed. She memorized the possible side effects of SSRI's in pregnancy. Anencephaly, which is when the baby is born with no brain. Omphalocele, where the intestines protrude through a hole in the abdomen. The whole thing got to be like this monster. She just didn't want it."

"What are you saying? Of course she wanted the baby." Willa had assumed he hadn't wanted it. Zeke, who at age one put his toys away, the improbable straight-arrow child sprung from the mess of his itinerant parents' lives, would not gladly interrupt the order of his life's events with the chaos of an unplanned baby. Willa didn't even believe he'd neglected birth control. Boys will be boys, she'd heard, but she only had the one and Zeke did the right thing every time. She and Iano had resisted lobbying for an abortion, but they saw this pregnancy as a duty imposed on their son, if not an ambush. Privately they'd worn out the tread on various speculations. None of their scenarios held a role for a Helene who did not want the baby.

She tried to picture Zeke in his apartment. "Oh, God. Did you… find her?"

Tig appeared in the doorway, round-eyed, looking painfully small in her baggy clothes, the corona of hair standing up around her head in a caricature of shock. She must have overheard some of this and was reading the rest in Willa's face.

Willa pointed at the package of pasta and jar of sauce and raised her eyebrows in a plea. With this daughter no wish was easily granted. Willa expected resistance as she stepped away from the stove, but Tig slid into the gap and began making dinner.

"Yeah, I did," Zeke said. "I got home from work and the baby was crying so hard he was choking. It freaked me out. I don't know how long he'd been… I changed his diaper, warmed up a bottle, fed him. I thought she was asleep. She's been sleeping so much, all these months. So I spent maybe an hour in the house like that, letting her sleep. Jesus, Mom. What if I'd gone in the bedroom sooner? What if I could have saved her?"

"The baby had been crying awhile when you got home, so she was gone already. Don't do that to yourself. Please, honey. You took care of your son."

The weight of these words hit Willa as she said them, a punch to the gut that must have produced a sound because Tig turned around, alarmed. It took effort for Willa to stay on her feet instead of sinking to the floor and pulling her knees to her chest as she cradled Zeke's voice in her ear. Her dutiful, promising son would be taking care of a child now, every day, marooned in the loneliness of single parenthood. Anger at the dead Helene rose like acid in her throat. So useless.

Tig stood watching her with the air of a fairy godmother, the wooden spoon tilting up from her fingers like a wand. Behind her the pot boiled. Willa closed her eyes and made herself speak calmly into the phone. "I can get there by morning."



Sitting in a grand Bostonian church trying to quiet a howling infant, wearing a designer suit that belonged to the girl in the coffin: even Willa's florid imagination hadn't seen this coming. The tight cut of the jacket constricted her movements. Mr. Armani didn't have baby-dandling in mind, not that any of this was his fault. Willa had thrown jeans into a duffle and headed out to rescue her son without giving a moment's thought to funeral wear. That was four, maybe five days ago, she'd lost track. Aldus had made no advances on sorting out night versus day, and she was operating on less sleep than she'd thought humanly possible. Getting dressed for the funeral was a task she undertook about thirty minutes before the event, and it sent her with some urgency into Helene's closet. She found everything on wooden hangers, organized by color, and within that orderly place she glimpsed the bond between the dead girl and her son. But the stunner was Helene's expensive taste. Checking labels quickly for size, Willa hyperventilated: Fendi, Versace, Ralph Lauren. A couple of suits were in her ball park, thank goodness. Helene must have nudged up a size before going into the chic maternity business wear.

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.