KINGSOLVER: Right, and of course, it's falling down.ĬURWOOD: And that's another thing that is in question these days. is to have two families living more than a century apart in the same house. We're reaching a moment in history when all those shelters are failing us.ĬURWOOD: So, your device, if I can use that word.ĬURWOOD. And when I say permanent truths, things like, well, like there will always be a job at the end of the college degree or tenure at the end of the track or a pension at the end of a career or good health care or even things like ice on the poles that will stay frozen, or that there will always be more fish in the sea. It's a moment that feels like crisis, like the end of the world as we know it. I think we're in the moment when so many things that we've always believed in as truths unquestionable are suddenly starting to feel not true anymore. That's what I think we're doing right now.

I spent several years thinking about how to write about paradigm shift. KINGSOLVER: Well, it's one of those books that took a while to cook. She joins us now, welcome back to Living on Earth!ĬURWOOD: Barbara Kingsolver, this is your first novel in, what, six years? So, what brought you the idea of writing what became Unsheltered now? Vineland, New Jersey, was first settled in the late 1800’s as a utopian experiment and the social issues there, as imagined in Barbara Kingsolver’s book, Unsheltered resonate equally with America’s reality back then and today. It’s a creative look at a family’s crisis in modern America, layered over the narrative of a story that unfolded in the same New Jersey town over a century earlier. The more things change the more they stay the same, goes the French aphorism, and popular author Barbara Kingsolver has a brilliant take on these unsettling times in her new novel Unsheltered.

Kingsolver unsheltered review