Showing results by author "Margot Livesey" in All Categories

Donald believes he knows all there is to know about seeing. An optician in suburban Boston, he rests assured that he and his wife, Viv, who works at the local stables, will live out quiet lives with their two children. Then Mercury - a gorgeous young racehorse - enters their lives, and everything changes.

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.

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, looks back.

Margot Livesey, one-third of the popular team that leads the annual Thalia Book Club discussions with Jennifer Egan and Siri Hustvedt, returns to discuss her first novel since 2012. Mercury is a beautifully crafted emotional thriller, which explores the ways in which relationships can be disrupted and ultimately destroyed by obsession, secrets, and ever-escalating lies. In conversation with author Meg Wolizter ( The Interestings). With a reading by Michael Cerveris ( Fun Home).

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.

Novelists Egan ( The Keep), Hustvedt ( The Sorrows of an American), and Livesey ( The House on Fortune Street) along with actress Hope Davis --the group that entertainingly and illuminatingly explored Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice at this book club--return by popular demand to revisit George Eliot's classic.