Tues. May 20 

Margot Livesey – a Scottish-born writer who currently the “ distinguished writer in residence at Emerson College – has written one of the most moving novels we’ve read this year. It’s called “The House on Fortune Street,” and, while compelling in its entirety, it’s not that easy to describe. As Livesey found out when she first started talking to the press about the book. Livesey told us: “I gave an early interview and I saw this pained incomprehension creep over her face. I realized I had to simplify the book and present it more as whole. To say there were four protagonists was not always helpful. So I said it was about friendship, the question of luck, and how people deal with damage.  I suggested that I hope the book is emotionally persuasive. I offer some dark material, but it’s not a depressing book.”

But the book does have four main characters: theater company director Abigail and social worker Dara, who become friends in college; Sean, a Keats’ scholar and an author of a book on euthanasia; and Cameron, Dara’s father – a sympathetic character who nevertheless has a deep, dark secret that make you squirm and certainly contributes to Dara’s emotional troubles. Actually, all of Livesey’s characters are flawed, but sympathetic. You care about what happens to each one. And you miss them when the book’s done.
“I do,” says the writer. “I spent a lot of time with the characters, and suddenly the door is closed. You spend time alone with the characters and suddenly other people start having opinions. Someone said to me, ‘What made you write about a pedophile?’” Livesey was stunned, because she doesn’t consider that character exactly a pedophile. She does say, “One of the cliches of our culture is that revealing secrets is a good thing.” Not always, she thinks.
On Tuesday May 20 8 at 7 Livesey continues her reading tour. What’s clever, but not showy, about “The House on Fortune Street,” is the way the stories unfold from each character’s perspective – and from different points in time. They all intersect at various points – a peripheral character becomes a main character – and it’s a pleasure following the transition, looking at life through other eyes.
“Part of the ambition of the novel was to try to write a novel that was lifelike, that presented a story where it didn’t arrive all at once. The reader would put together the story like they do in life,” Livesey says. “I wrote the sections as they appear in the novel. “I couldn’t always explain the direction I was going … but I wanted to write about a long friendship between two women, but one of the characters would enter the story through the back.” That’s Dara, Cameron’s daughter, who wants to do good work, wants to fall romantically in love, and wants to be a part of Abigail’s life after she re-enters it years after they became friends at college.”
“In some ways Dara was the most complicated character to create. She’s not a very assertive person, she lacks self-confidence and wants rather traditional things, romantic things, love,” The difficulty was in trying “to justify the ordinariness of her feelings, whereas Abigail, with her ambitions, she’s more armor-plated, and was in some way easier. Cameron: was a surprise to me, in some ways. I made the task easier by deciding I’d write about him in the first person. I was worried if he was presented from the outside; readers would judge him quite harshly. What he feels is so outside the pale of ‘acceptable behavior.’ Once I started writing about him in the first person, I began to empathize with him and I hope the reader finds himself or herself in that same position. I did some interviews and case histories of people who seemed.” Cameron, says Livesey, “does something terrible, but not as terrible as we might think.”
Luck, good and bad factor in  “To me,” says Livesey, “it plays a mysterious role. Abigail and Dara both have their worlds fall apart when they’re ten years old, We see Abigail’s armor is a product of the damage she suffered as a child, but she’s not as scathed as Dara. There’s a lot of luck involved in life – like Abigail being left enough money (in a will) to buy a house, to
survive the kind of childhood damage.”
“ I feel most of the major decisions in my life have been entirely haphazard, more a result of luck than determination.”
Livesey says she found her feet as a writer in 1983 with a particular short story. Previously, she’d worked in restaurants and she jokes about how much more preferable it is talking about writing than “asking people how they want their steaks done.”
“The House on Fortune Street” is her sixth novel, maybe a breakthrough.
Is she nervous now about its reception? “It’s a different kind,” she says. “With my first couple of books I had no ideas how reviews happened, they were like autumn leaves that fell from the trees. Whatever happened I appreciated with great gratitude. Then I learned more and it increased my level of nervousness, because you’re dependent on the good will of strangers.”
So far, the reviews have been strong. “Moving, gruffly tender and piercingly truthful,” said Kirkus Reviews. “Livesey has plenty of critical respect already, but her talents merit a broad popular audience as well.” Booklist wrote that she “incisively explores the sinuous themes of regret and responsibility, truth and trust with an understated yet tenacious certainty.” 
Livesey splits her time between the Boston area and the UK, frequently traveling back to Scotland and London, but she says “happily married to someone very wedded to this area.”
Livesy will be at Odyssey Bookshop May 20 at 7 in S. Hadley, Harvard Bookstore May 28 at 7 and Newtonville Books June 22 at 2.

Odyssey, 9 College St., S. Hadley
Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville