Works by
Margot Livesey
(Aka Margaret Livesey)
(Writer)
[1953 - ]

Fiction

• The House on Fortune Street (2008)
  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 frightening intensity. Now both believe they've found "true love." But luck seems to run out when Dara moves into Abigail's downstairs apartment. Suddenly both their friendship and their relationships are in peril, for tragedy is waiting to strike the house on Fortune Street.
  
  Told through four ingeniously interlocking narratives, Margot Livesey's The House on Fortune Street is a provocative tale of lives shaped equally by chance and choice.

• Banishing Verona (2005)
  Zeke is twenty-nine and working as a carpenter and painter in London. Verona is thirty-seven, headstrong, 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 24 hours later when Verona mysteriously disappears. After much searching, Zeke discovers that Verona has travelled to Boston to help Henry, her brother, disentangle himself from some shady financial matters. As impulsively as he fell for Verona, Zeke decides to follow her to Boston. It is here that both lovers take on further and more desperate searches of their own, and Livesey’s sophisticated novel evolves into the most surprising and suspenseful of modern love stories.

• Eva Moves the Furniture (2001)
  On 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 their small Scottish town. As a child, Eva is often visited by two companions--a woman and a girl--invisible to everyone else save her. As she grows, their intentions become increasingly unclear: Do they wish to protect or harm her? A magical novel about loneliness, love, and the profound connection between mother and daughter, Eva Moves the Furniture fuses the simplicity of a fairy tale with the complexity of adult passions.

• The Missing World (2000)
  What if-by a 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 her ex-boyfriend Jonathan. What follows is a brilliant inverted love story: one man's desperate attempts to realize and rationalize a lie, and a woman's harrowing attempts to recognize the truth.

• Criminals (1996)
  With dark poetry and domestic acuity, the author of Homework shows how families pull together, form themselves anew, and occasionally fly apart at the seams. Ranging from Scotland to America to Italy--and to a novel-within-a-novel--Criminals brilliantly captures the stories of complicated, sympathetic people who try to do right but turn somehow wrong.

• Homework (1990)
  Celia Gilchrist believes that she has finally found the right man in Stephen, but when she moves in with him 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 is an affecting portrait of jealousy and fear, devotion and the desire to be loved.

Short Stories

• Learning by Heart: Short Stories (1986)

See also:

• Biography - Margot Livesey (2007)
  An article from Contemporary Authors Online by Gale Reference Team, Digital - HTML