How could two hardworking people do everything right in life a woman asks and end up
destitute? Willa Knox and her husband followed all the rules as responsible parents and
professionals and have nothing to show for it but debts and an inherited brick house that is
falling apart. The magazine where Willa worked has folded the college where her husband had
tenure has closed. Their dubious shelter is also the only option for a disabled father-in-law
and an exasperating free-spirited daughter. When the family's one success story an
Ivy-educated son is uprooted by tragedy he seems likely to join them with dark complications
of his own. In another time a troubled husband and public servant asks How can a man tell the
truth and be reviled for it? A science teacher with a passion for honest investigation
Thatcher Greenwood finds himself under siege: his employer forbids him to speak of the exciting
work just published by Charles Darwin. His young bride and social-climbing mother-in-law
bristle at the risk of scandal and dismiss his worries that their elegant house is unsound. In
a village ostensibly founded as a benevolent Utopia Thatcher wants only to honor his duties
but his friendships with a woman scientist and a renegade newspaper editor threaten to draw him
into a vendetta with the town's powerful men. Unsheltered is the compulsively readable story of
two families in two centuries who live at the corner of Sixth and Plum in Vineland New
Jersey navigating what seems to be the end of the world as they know it. With history as their
tantalizing canvas these characters paint a startlingly relevant portrait of life in
precarious times when the foundations of the past have failed to prepare us for the future.
