Thatcher is an advocate of Charles Darwin, and his lessons alarm and infuriate the school’s head teacher, Cutler, who, like Landis and much of Vineland, sees the world – and his special place in it – as part of God’s intended design. “Every person in history must have placed himself at the head of a Creator’s table,” muses Thatcher, on the threat to this entrenched world view that Darwin poses.

Through alternating chapters, Kingsolver deftly tracks the echoes reverberating between these two Americas. In 1871, another married couple also live on this land: a science teacher, Thatcher Greenwood, and his frivolous young wife Rose, in a similarly ropy construction in Vineland, a new, purportedly utopian community founded by businessman Captain Landis. In early 2016, in the last months of Obama’s presidency, Willa Knox, a once gainfully employed, now stutteringly freelance journalist, and her academic husband Iano, who has spent his career vainly chasing tenure, inherit a dilapidated late-19th-century house near the college where Iano has secured a 12-month contract. In fact, Unsheltered contains not just one disintegrating house but two, built on the same plot of land in New Jersey and housing two different families 150 years apart. Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel is clearly inspired by the crisis of Trump’s America, but it is also about what it might mean to live when previously trusted ideologies or economic systems are challenged to breaking point, and what might follow in their wake.

When the novel’s title is Unsheltered, you’ve got an unambiguous statement of intent. When a family in a novel moves into a house that’s starting to fall down, you can bet money there’s a metaphor in there somewhere.

Unsheltered by barbara kingsolver