The historical thread zooms back to the 1870s, in a chaotic war-scarred nation. The modern-day thread explores the falling fortunes of Willa Knox, a journalist whose magazine tanked her professor husband, Iano, who has lost tenure their adult son, Zeke, whose wife has died by suicide, leaving him with staggering debts and a baby he’s not sure he wants daughter Tig, a rebellious and secretly heartbroken young woman and Iano’s dying old father, Nick, who rants about immigrants and “Obamacare,” despite the saving presence of both in his own life.

“Unsheltered” features two parallel narratives, each set in a deteriorating old house on a corner lot in Vineland, N.J., a real city deeply researched by Kingsolver. Declaring America to be in “dangerously uncertain times,” she says “it seemed useful to look at other times in history when the fabric of convention was falling apart.” In a brief introduction to her latest, “Unsheltered,” she lets readers know that she’s about to unleash another literary juggernaut at the powers that be. In exceptionally intelligent works that include “The Poisonwood Bible,” “The Lacuna” and “Flight Behavior,” she has put her gifts as a writer and biologist to work telling vivid stories that aim to expose America’s fault lines - anti-intellectualism, the unholy tangle of patriotism and religion, unfettered market forces and the destruction of the natural world.

Novelist Barbara Kingsolver has always embraced the prophetic voice.

Unsheltered book review