Product Description

It seems like mutual good luck for Abigail Taylor and Dara MacLeod when they meet at St. Andrews University and, despite their differences, become fast friends. Years later they remain an unlikely pair. Abigail, an actress who confidently uses her charms both on- and offstage, believes herself immune to love. Dara, a counselor, is convinced that everyone is inescapably marked by childhood; she throws herself into romantic relationships with frightening intensity. Yet now each seems to have found "true love"—another stroke of luck?—Abigail with her academic boyfriend, Sean, and Dara with a tall, dark violinist named Edward, who literally falls at her feet. But soon after Dara moves into Abigail's downstairs apartment, trouble threatens both relationships, and their friendship.

For Abigail it comes in the form of an anonymous letter to Sean claiming that she's been unfaithful; for Dara, a reconciliation with her distant father, Cameron, who left the family when Dara was ten, reawakens complicated feelings. Through four ingeniously interlocking narratives—Sean's, Cameron's, Dara's, and Abigail's—we gradually understand how these characters' lives are shaped by both chance and determination. Whatever the source, there is no mistaking the tragedy that strikes the house on Fortune Street.

"Everyone," claims Abigail, "has a book or a writer who's the key to their life." As this statement reverberates through each of the narratives, Margot Livesey skillfully reveals how luck—good and bad—plays a vital role in our lives, and how the search for truth can prove a dangerous undertaking. Written with her characteristic elegance and wit, The House on Fortune Street offers a surprisingly provocative detective story of the heart.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #33774 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-01
• Released on: 2008-05-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The absorbing latest from Livesey (Homework) opens multiple perspectives on the life of Dara MacLeod, a young London therapist, partly by paying subtle homage to literary figures and works. The first of four sections follows Keats scholar Sean Wyman: his girlfriend, Abigail, is Dara's best friend, and the couple lives upstairs from Dara in the titular London house. While Dara tries to coax her boyfriend Edward to move out of the house he shares with his ex-girlfriend and daughter, Sean receives a mysterious letter implying that Abigail is having an affair, and both relationships start to fall apart. The second section, set during Dara's childhood, is narrated by Dara's father, who has a strange fascination with Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) and shares Dodgson's creepy interest in young girls. Dara's meeting with Edward dominates part three, which mirrors the plot of Jane Eyre, and the final part, reminiscent of Great Expectations, is told mainly from Abigail's college-era point of view. The pieces cross-reference and fit together seamlessly, with Dara's fate being revealed by the end of part one and explained in the denouement. Livesey's use of the classics enriches the narrative, giving Dara a larger-than-life resonance. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Donna Rifkind

None of the houses in Margot Livesey's newest novel is safe or sound enough to meet the needs of its inhabitants, including the house on Fortune Street in the Brixton area of London that lends the book its title. The most durable structure here, in fact, is not a house but the novel itself, whose design unites so seamlessly with its intentions that one wants to admire it from every angle.

Livesey encourages readers to do just that by dividing the book into four sections, each with a distinct point of view. First is Sean, a Keats scholar in his early 30s; followed by Cameron, a middle-aged amateur photographer; Dara, Cameron's daughter, who works as a therapist in a women's center; and Abigail, an actress, who is Sean's girlfriend as well as Dara's best friend from college.

Although these four sections include overlapping plot points and details, their purpose is not to provide a "Rashomon"-like retelling of the same events from different perspectives. Instead, through the divided narrative Livesey intends to show us how separate these characters are -- how little, despite their proximity, they actually share -- for this is a novel that is above all about loneliness.

Sean, for instance, lives on the top floors of the Fortune Street house with Abigail, who bought the building with money she inherited from an aunt. On the surface, he and Abigail look like a genuinely happy pair: Sean recently left his wife for Abigail, who had vigorously pursued him, and for a brief time their new romance was mutually thrilling. But lately Sean has been restive and self-doubting, unable to make much progress on his dissertation. And Abigail, who has begun to insist that Sean contribute to the household's upkeep by paying rent, is rarely at home, working late hours and traveling to drum up support for her budding theater company.

In the meantime, Dara, who lives alone on the bottom floor of Abigail's house, is struggling to improve her own domestic arrangements. Though she yearns for a husband and children, she's emotionally entangled with a violinist who can't offer her more than vague promises. She spends her workdays self-confidently dispensing advice to other women about their rocky relationships, but spends too many evenings disconsolately alone.

If the future for these characters is uncertain, their pasts are even more bewildering. Dara and Abigail became best friends when they met at university (St. Andrews in Scotland), after they realized that each "had had a version of Eden from which she had been expelled, abruptly and irrevocably, at the age of ten." For Abigail, the paradise of her childhood ended with the deaths of her much-loved grandparents, leaving her at the mercy of her unreliable mother and father. Dara's sense of safety vanished at the same age, when a disastrous family camping trip exposed secrets that led the way to her parents' divorce.

Dara never finds out exactly why her father left, but the reader does, thanks to the section devoted entirely to her father's point of view. In fact, we learn several illuminating secrets about Cameron, who was raised in rural Scotland in the 1950s, an era when children were encouraged to soldier on silently during difficult times. Much of Cameron's section is devoted to his lifelong efforts to understand the impulses and emotions he was taught to bury. And although he does finally achieve a measure of self-knowledge, he's unable to share most of it with Dara, who mistakenly believes he abandoned her because he didn't love her enough.

Small wonder that these lives, built unsteadily atop traumatic childhood events, have little forward momentum. Yet the narrative never seems mired in the same ways as its characters: It keeps turning and turning, like an architectural model on a revolving pedestal, revealing something new with every spin.

And for all its melancholy, the novel leaves readers with a surprising hopefulness. Some of this arises from the pleasures of its style: Livesey has chosen every detail here with precision, from toast crumbs to paint colors, to evoke the shimmering illusion of these characters' home-based lives. For all her care, the construction feels effortless. Even the stark divisions of the book into quarters seem inevitable rather than jarring.

But the book's hopefulness has an even deeper source: the continuity of the English literary tradition. All the characters have sincere attachments to canonical British authors, going so far as to travel to their houses to observe how they lived. Sean has his beloved Keats, of course, while Dara often compares herself with Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. Cameron becomes absorbed with the life of Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, the creator of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Abigail's grandfather, who emigrated from Germany, learned how to be English by reading the works of Charles Dickens, and Abigail has inherited his devotion to the author, falling in love with the house on Fortune Street for its Dickensian-sounding name.

Again, Livesey's skill keeps these relationships perfectly organic and never forced. By situating her novel firmly within the house of literature, she honors its history while adding on some elegantly appointed rooms of her own.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Review
"I loved this book. The House on Fortune Street pulled me in and kept me rapt from start to finish. Margot Livesey is writing at her very best." -- Ann Patchett, Author of RUN and BEL CANTO

"Structurally daring and compulsively readable, THE HOUSE ON FORTUNE STREET illuminates the complexities of love in some of its most difficult guises, and of loss in all of its immensity. " -- Geraldine Brooks, Author of PEOPLE OF THE BOOK and MARCH

Customer Reviews

classic livesey
I am always so pleased when Margot Livesey publishes a new book, especially so this time. This is a beautifully written novel that is really smart about people, about their motivations and desires. Livesey handle's each of the main character's perspectives with insight and generosity yet is never afraid to glimpse human darkness as well as light.

Different.
Well written, intelligent and truly absorbing---but most of all, it is different. I felt that I got to know each of the four main characters in the book (warts and all.)
The book doesn't preach, and it took me a week after I finished to realize it's about acceptance and forgiveness. I want to give 4 1/2 stars (I reserve five stars for only very few books.)
Anyway, this book does not disappoint.

Luck and Loss on Fortune Street....
Abigail Taylor and Dara McLeod meet at university in Scotland, where despite their differences, they forge a fast friendship.

Over the years, the friendship ebbs and flows, the emotional and geographical distances between them often magnified by these differences. Abigail becomes an actress and Dara becomes a counselor at a women's center, where the clients are often the victims of some kind
of abuse.

When many years later, Dara begins renting the downstairs flat in a house Abigail owns in London, the house on Fortune Street that symbolizes a great achievement for Abigail, their friendship seemingly grows closer. But events conspire to trouble their friendship and their relationship, while tragedy lurks around the corner.

We see the story unfurl gradually, from different points of view. First, there is Sean, Abigail's live-in lover; then Cameron, Dara's father; Dara brings her own perspective to the tale; while Abigail paints the final touches.

We discover that Abigail and Dara are not that different after all. They each suffered traumatic losses at critical points in her childhood. Abigail has never had a home...her parents were like gypsies---moving about, changing jobs, losing money, living hand-to-mouth.

They literally robbed Abigail of that foundation of belonging somewhere. Dara, whose father left the family without a word when she was only ten, suffers that loss of self-esteem that often accompanies such an event. Cameron, who seems cold and unfeeling to his daughter, has suffered his own traumas and has a secret fear that defines every action he takes.

When these underlying definitive events are gradually revealed, the final moments feel almost inevitable.

The House on Fortune Street: A Novel is a heart-wrenching saga of love, loss, secrets and betrayal---the ingredients of a
memorable story.