I am a huge fan of Susan Palwick. My personal favorite Palwick book is The Necessary Beggar, but the others are also great.
Shelter is about a mentally ill child, an AI rights movement, a number of people bound together by complex family ties and social relations, and a homeless guy who takes care of cats. It is very gripping and you want to read it right through to the end.
Meredith wants to give shelter to her mentally ill child so he won't be brainwiped. Her child wants shelter from the monsters. Henry the homeless guy is looking for shelter to sleep in and shelter for his cats. Roberta wants the shelter of family after all of her original family die. The AIs and uploaded personalities are looking for the shelter of legal rights. Everyone is looking for physical shelter from a huge storm with flooding.
The amazon editorial review says this book is slow and recommends it for younger readers (since when do young people like slow things?). I would recommend it for sophisticated readers, whether older or younger, who can pick up on all the characters' complex emotions, and I read the book all the way through in a day and a half. It's not slow. It's just the size of a large dictionary. That means there's *more to read.*