Margot Livesey

Margot Livesey's first book, a collection of stories called Learning By Heart, was published by Penguin Canada in 1986. Since then she has published the novels Homework, Criminals, The Missing World, Eva Moves the Furniture, Banishing Verona, The House on Fortune Street, and The Flight of Gemma Hardy.

Livesey's newly released eighth novel is Mercury.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

I’ve been reading Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. First published in 1952 when it won the National Book Award, Invisible Man remains an exhilarating and deeply painful book. After a series of misadventures, the unnamed narrator is forced to leave the southern college he loves and move to New York. He works in a paint factory for a disastrous day, ends up enduring electric shock treatment and then becomes a spokesman for a movement called the Brotherhood. Over and over he finds himself manipulated by white men and sometimes by black men too. Some early critics called the novel surreal but Ellison said it was reality that was surreal. The novel is told mostly in brilliant extended scenes, and is often very funny.

Visit Margot Livesey's website and Facebook page.

The Page 69 Test: The Flight of Gemma Hardy.

The Page 69 Test: Mercury.

--Marshal Zeringue