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“Bewitching and seductive.” —Rebecca Makkai, author of I Have Some Questions for You • “A treasure: a writer who understands the magic and mysteries of the human soul." —Chris Bohjalian, author of Hour of the Witch • “This book is a cold, clear, perfect lake." —Lauren Groff, author of The Vaster WildsGrowing 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...

The New York Times bestselling author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy delivers another "luminous, unforgettable, and perfectly rendered" (Dennis Lehane) novel—a poignant and probing psychological drama that follows the lives of three siblings in the wake of a violent crime.One September afternoon in 1999, teenagers Matthew, Zoe, and Duncan Lang are walking home from school when they discover a boy lying in a field, bloody and unconscious. Thanks to their intervention, the boy's life is saved. In the aftermath, all three siblings are irrevocably changed. Matthew, the oldest, becomes obsessed with tracking down the assailant, secretly searching the local town with the victim's brother. Zoe wanders the streets of Oxford, looking at men, and one of them, a visiting American graduate student, returns her gaze. Duncan, the youngest, who has seldom thought about being adopted, suddenly decides he wants to find his birth mother. Overshadowing all three...

When her widower father drowns at sea, Gemma Hardy is taken from her native Iceland to Scotland to live with her kind uncle and his family. But the death of her doting guardian leaves Gemma under the care of her resentful aunt, and it soon becomes clear that she is nothing more than an unwelcome guest at Yew House. When she receives a scholarship to a private school, ten-year-old Gemma believes she's found the perfect solution and eagerly sets out again to a new home. However, at Claypoole she finds herself treated as an unpaid servant.To Gemma's delight, the school goes bankrupt, and she takes a job as an au pair on the Orkney Islands. The remote Blackbird Hall belongs to Mr. Sinclair, a London businessman; his eight-year-old niece is Gemma's charge. Even before their first meeting, Gemma is, like everyone on the island, intrigued by Mr. Sinclair. Rich (by Gemma's standards), single, flying in from London when he pleases, Hugh Sinclair fills the house with life. An unlikely...

Following the acclaimed Criminals comes a spellbinding new novel that confirms Margot Livesey's place "right up there," as Liz Smith wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer, "in the realm of P. D. James and the esteemed Patricia Highsmith."What if -- by stroke of fortune -- you could start afresh, could wipe away that catastrophic blunder in your past? And to what lengths would you go to establish that in fact you'd done nothing wrong at all? After an accident robs Hazel of three years' worth of memory, just such an opportunity is granted to Jonathan, undone by his betrayal of this woman, whom he professes to love above all. While he begins to rewrite their history, two other misfits -- an American sojourner and a luckless English actress -- knock about London, each of them haunted by indelible memories they would much rather forget. Eventually their hopes of redemption draw them toward Jonathan's house, where Hazel has become a virtual prisoner . ....

From a highly acclaimed author-the enchanting, bittersweet story of a motherless young woman torn between real life and the otherwordly campanions only she can seeOn the morning of Eva McEwen's birth, six magpies congregate in the apple tree outside the window-a bad omen, according to Scottish legend. That night Eva's mother dies, leaving her to be raised by her aunt and heartsick father in the small town of Troon, Scotland.As a child, Eva is often visited by two companions: a woman and a girl. Invisible to everyone else, they seem benevolent at first, helping her to tidy her room and collect the hens' eggs. But as she grows older, their intentions become increasingly unclear: Do they wish to protect or harm her? Is their meddling in her best interest or prompted by darker motivations?In the shadow of World War II, Eva studies nursing in Glasgow, tending to the wounded soldiers. But when she falls in love with a young plastic surgeon, the...

A couple begins an intense affair, only to be separated abruptly-and perhaps irrevocably-in this surprising, suspenseful love story Zeke is twenty-nine, a man who looks like a Raphael angel and who earns his living as a painter and carpenter in London. He reads the world a little differently from most people and has trouble with such ordinary activities as lying, deciphering expressions, recognizing faces. Verona is thirty-seven, confident, hot-tempered, a modestly successful radio show host, unmarried, and seven months pregnant. When the two meet in a house that Zeke is renovating, they fall in love, only to be separated less than twenty-four hours later when Verona leaves abruptly, without explanation, for Boston. Both Zeke and Verona, it turns out, have complications in their lives, though not of a romantic kind. Verona's involve her brother, Henry, who is tied up in shady financial dealings. Zeke's father has had a heart attack and his mother is...

Donald believes he knows all there is to know about seeing. An optometrist in suburban Boston, he is sure that he and his wife, Viv, who runs the local stables, are both devoted to their two children and to each other. Then Mercury—a gorgeous young thoroughbred with a murky past—arrives at Windy Hill and everything changes.Mercury's owner, Hilary, is a newcomer to town who has enrolled her daughter in riding lessons. When she brings Mercury to board at Windy Hill, everyone is struck by his beauty and prowess, particularly Viv. As she rides him, Viv begins to dream of competing again, embracing the ambitions that she had harbored, and relinquished, as a young woman. Her daydreams soon morph into consuming desire, and her infatuation with the thoroughbred escalates to obsession.Donald may have 20/20 vision but he is slow to notice how profoundly Viv has changed and how these changes threaten their quiet, secure world. By the time he does, it is too late...

Celia Gilchrist believes that she has finally found the right man in Stephen, but when she moves in with Stephen and his young daughter Jenny, things begin to go subtly, menacingly wrong. Money disappears, a sweater is ruined, small, common-place lies escalate into awkward confrontations. Livesey's debut novel, now back in print, is a chilling portrait of jealousy and fear, devotion, and the wish to be loved.

A decent, harried young banker, already on the verge of distraction, hurries north to Scotland and his mysteriously troubled sister . . . A “foreign” mother struggles to make a home for her family in a society she only vaguely comprehends . . . A baby girl is abandoned in a bus-station rest room . . . And thus five lives and more are caught up in a binding net of affection and responsibility, of sibling loyalty, romantic longing, and maternal love.Amazon.com ReviewCriminals is a tweaked gothic. Instead of a dark castle, there is an average Scottish farmhouse, Mill of Fortune. There is nothing supernatural, and the love story is all in one character's mind, nearly losing him his livelihood. Ewan is less a knight-at-arms than a London businessman, and his sister is the madwoman. Mollie, however, is not in the attic, but very much up and about after her novelist-lover has left her. Ewan knows he must check on her and heads for Scotland. During a bus layover, he hears a small whimper and is amazed to find a baby in a bathroom stall. Hearing his bus about to leave, he grabs the bundle and ends up taking it with him. Unfortunately, Mollie's reaction is not one he had hoped for: instead of calling the police, she lays siege, and their criminal career begins. Margot Livesey is clearly interested in exploring one question: How much do you really know about your family? For six chapters, the narration goes back and forth between brother and sister, but the seventh is a surprise--devoted to the man who left the baby on the filthy floor. Kenneth's thought processes are sinister and idiotic, giving him a great deal of comic energy. Having followed Ewan to Mill of Fortune, he is determined to bilk him out of as much money as possible. "Ideas, he thought, I am an ideas man." As Kenneth does his brutal best and Ewan is caught up in insider-trading complications, Mollie--still hanging onto the child--grows increasingly paranoid: "She heard something. Had Ewan spoken? Had the table? She examined each in turn. The sleek wood had grown oddly smug and duplicitous ..." Livesey is an expert practitioner of the fiction of threat, the novel of isolation and misery in which the family is a nest of sorrows. From Publishers Weekly"Banker finds Baby in Bus station" is the caption that uptight London bachelor Ewan Munro ruefully realizes will describe events in this intriguing novel about the banality of evil. Discovering a swaddled infant in a lavatory stall in Perth, Ewan almost absentmindedly takes the baby to his unstable sister, Mollie Lafferty, intending to call the authorities once he arrives at her home. Mollie is in a bad way; she has split with her novelist husband, anguished because he has fictionalized her in his current novel, and, she thinks, given away secrets she didn't even realize she harbored. (Chunks of this novel are interpolated as Ewan reads it, adding tension to a narrative already taut with frightening implications.) For Mollie now recognizes that her great need is to have a child, and she conspires to keep the baby. Meanwhile, the child's feckless father, an amoral layabout called Kenneth, who has impetuously abandoned his daughter, realizes that he can extort money when he shows up to claim her; and her mother, a nurse from Bombay, becomes distraught at the infant's disappearance. Scottish-born Livesey (Homework) controls the narrative with assurance, gradually laying bare the bedrock of her characters' inner lives. One reads with fascinated attention as Ewan and Mollie?he preoccupied by a lapse in his meticulously moral behavior that has made him complicit in illegal trading; she sliding into emotional breakdown?discover how easy it is to become criminals. Livesey maintains a low-key style that perfectly matches the way ordinary lives can slip into chaos; her elegantly simple prose, her control of pacing and characterization and her insights into human behavior combine to produce a fascinating narrative. 50,000 first printing; Literary Guild selection. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

It seems like mutual good luck for Abigail Taylor and Dara MacLeod when they meet at St. Andrews University and, despite their differences, become fast friends. Years later they remain an unlikely pair. Abigail, an actress who confidently uses her charms both on- and offstage, believes herself immune to love. Dara, a counselor, is convinced that everyone is inescapably marked by childhood; she throws herself into romantic relationships with frightening intensity. Yet now each seems to have found "true love"—another stroke of luck?—Abigail with her academic boyfriend, Sean, and Dara with a tall, dark violinist named Edward, who literally falls at her feet. But soon after Dara moves into Abigail's downstairs apartment, trouble threatens both relationships, and their friendship. For Abigail it comes in the form of an anonymous letter to Sean claiming that she's been unfaithful; for Dara, a reconciliation with her distant father, Cameron, who left the family when Dara was ten, reawakens complicated feelings. Through four ingeniously interlocking narratives—Sean's, Cameron's, Dara's, and Abigail's—we gradually understand how these characters' lives are shaped by both chance and determination. Whatever the source, there is no mistaking the tragedy that strikes the house on Fortune Street. "Everyone," claims Abigail, "has a book or a writer who's the key to their life." As this statement reverberates through each of the narratives, Margot Livesey skillfully reveals how luck—good and bad—plays a vital role in our lives, and how the search for truth can prove a dangerous undertaking. Written with her characteristic elegance and wit, The House on Fortune Street offers a surprisingly provocative detective story of the heart.