Margot Livesey: 10 books

A masterclass for those who love reading literature and for those who aspire to write it. “Read everything that is good for the good of your soul. Then learn to read as a writer, to search out that hidden machinery, which it is the business of art to conceal and the business of the apprentice...

It seems like mutual good luck for Abigail Taylor and Dara MacLeod when they meet at university and, despite their differences, become fast friends. Years later they remain inseparable: Abigail, the actress, allegedly immune to romance, and Dara, a therapist, throwing herself into relationships with...

The resonant story of a young woman’s struggle to take charge of her own future, The Flight of Gemma Hardy is a modern take on a classic story—Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre—that will fascinate readers of the Gothic original and fans of modern literary fiction alike, with its lyrical prose,...

A deluxe Harper Perennial Legacy Edition, with an introduction from Margot Livesey, award-winning and New York Times best-selling author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy A compelling historical novel of two families wrestling with questions of honor, class, loyalty, democracy, and independence...

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 --...

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...

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 a highly acclaimed author-the enchanting, bittersweet story of a motherless young woman torn between real life and the otherwordly companions only she can see. On the morning of Eva McEwen's birth, six magpies congregate in the apple tree outside the window-a bad omen, according to Scottish...

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...

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...