In The Road from Belhaven, Margot Livesey (The Boy in the Field; Mercury) eloquently traces the fictional life of Lizzie Craig, a girl from eastern Scotland in the late 1880s. After her parents die when she's a year old, Lizzie is raised by her loving, hardscrabble grandparents at Belhaven Farm--located inland, in the part of Scotland called "the Kingdom of Fife." Lizzie is just a toddler when she starts to have premonitions--secret visions she calls "pictures" that reveal future events that often confuse and frighten her. Sometimes these intuitions involve "ordinary things: her grandmother choosing which hen to kill; a cow stuck in the mud by the river." But other times, they prophesize harrowing actions and accidents over which she has no control. Or does she?
Lizzie is a lonely, responsible child when she learns that she has an older sister, Kate, who was sent to live with her paternal grandparents after their parents died. Circumstances change so that 16-year-old Kate now comes to live at Belhaven. The sisters, disparate in personality, struggle to adjust to one another, although in time they find ways to bond. But when she falls in love as a teenager, Lizzie chases her love interest to Glasgow, where her life takes heart-wrenching twists and turns. Is there any way Lizzie can harness her powers of perception in order to change the course of her own life and destiny?
Compassionately drawn and emotionally charged, Margot Livesey's novel maps the tenderest places of the human heart and soul and once again displays her indelible grasp on the human condition. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines