What is Margot Livesey reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Margot Livesey, author of The Road from Belhaven.

Her entry begins:

I am reading The Blue Window by Suzanne Berne. The novel takes place over a few days when Lorna, a therapist, drives to Vermont with her son Adam to visit her taciturn mother, Marika. All her adult life Lorna has grappled with the inexplicable fact that her mother left the family and completely ignored her children for many years. Now Adam has come home from university barely speaking because of some trauma he won’t reveal. As for Marika, in her eighties she now needs help but refuses to admit it. The chapters revolve between the three main characters to splendid effect. Adam’s gloom and doom - he refers to himself as A - makes him surprisingly sympathetic with his grandmother. Part of the skill of this wonderfully intelligent novel is...[read on]

About The Road from Belhaven, from the publisher:

From the New York Times best-selling author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy, a novel about a young woman whose gift of second sight complicates her coming of age in late-nineteenth-century Scotland

Growing up in the care of her grandparents on Belhaven Farm, Lizzie Craig discovers as a small child that she can see into the future. But her gift is selective—she doesn’t, for instance, see that she has an older sister who will come to join the family. As her “pictures” foretell various incidents and accidents, she begins to realize a painful truth: she may glimpse the future, but she can seldom change it.

Nor can Lizzie change the feelings that come when a young man named Louis, visiting Belhaven for the harvest, begins to court her. Why have the adults around her not revealed that the touch of a hand can change everything? After following Louis to Glasgow, though, she learns the limits of his devotion. Faced with a seemingly impossible choice, she makes a terrible mistake. But her second sight may allow her a second chance.

Luminous and transporting, The Road from Belhaven once again displays “the marvelous control of a writer who conjures equally well the tangible, sensory world . . . and the mysteries, stranger and wilder, that flicker at the border of that world.” —The Boston Globe

Visit Margot Livesey's website and Facebook page.

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Q&A with Margot Livesey.

The Page 69 Test: The Boy in the Field.

The Page 69 Test: The Road from Belhaven.

Writers Read: Margot Livesey.

--Marshal Zeringue