In The Road from Belhaven, Margot Livesey eloquently traces the fictional life of Lizzie Craig, a girl from eastern Scotland in the late 1880s. Lizzie struggles to navigate a life detoured with challenges and disappointments that draw her away--physically, emotionally, and spiritually--from the safe and familiar.
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--happiest on the farm, doing chores and being around animals. When her grandfather hires help for the farm, Lizzie and her 13-year-old world begin to open like a chrysalis, exposing her to new adventures and experiences. This includes her learning for the first time 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, but in time they find ways to bond. When Lizzie learns that her sister, being the oldest, will, in all likelihood inherit Belhaven Farm with her husband someday, Lizzie makes life choices that are dictated by that knowledge. At the age of 14, Lizzie falls in love. Much to the dismay of her grandparents, she eventually chases after her love interest, becoming a caretaker and moving from rural Belhaven to the city of 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 (The Boy in the Field; Mercury) 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
Shelf Talker: Margot Livesey draws a poignant, beautiful portrait of the romantic twists and turns that define the life of a perceptively sensitive Scottish woman in the 19th century.