Description
From the New York Times best-selling author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy, a novel about a young woman whose gift of second sight complicates her coming of age in late-nineteenth-century Scotland
“Bewitching and seductive.” —Rebecca Makkai, author of I Have Some Questions for You • “A treasure: a writer who understands the magic and mysteries of the human soul." —Chris Bohjalian, author of Hour of the Witch • “This book is a cold, clear, perfect lake." —Lauren Groff, author of The Vaster Wilds
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. Why have the adults around her not revealed that the touch of a hand can change everything? After following Louis to Glasgow, though, she learns the limits of his devotion. Faced with a seemingly impossible choice, she makes a terrible mistake. But her second sight may allow her a second chance.
Luminous and transporting, The Road from Belhaven once again displays “the marvelous control of a writer who conjures equally well the tangible, sensory world . . . and the mysteries, stranger and wilder, that flicker at the border of that world.” —The Boston Globe
About the Author
Margot grew up in a boys' private school in the Scottish Highlands where her father taught, and her mother, Eva, was the school nurse. After taking a B.A. in English and philosophy at the University of York in England she spent most of her twenties working in restaurants and learning to write. Her first book, a collection of stories calledLearning By Heart,was published in Canada in 1986. Since then Margot has published nine novels:Homework, Criminals, The Missing World, Eva Moves the Furniture, Banishing Verona, The House on Fortune Street, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, MercuryandThe Boy in the Field. She has also publishedThe Hidden Machinery: Essays on Writing.Her tenth novel,The Road from Belhaven, will be published by Knopf in February, 2024.Margot has taught at Boston University, Bowdoin College, Brandeis University, Carnegie Mellon, Cleveland State, Emerson College, Tufts University, the University of California at Irvine, the Warren Wilson College MFA program for writers, and Williams College. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute, the Guggenheim Foundation, the N.E.A., the Massachusetts Artists' Foundation and the Canada Council for the Arts. Margot currently teaches at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.
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