they ate one of the ducks, she tried not to think which one

the road from belhaven (margot livesey, 2024)

Nigel J C Turnbull / Tuilyies Standing Stones near Torryburn / CC BY-SA 2.0

The Road from Belhaven (Margot Livesey, 2024)¹

I believe I’ve mentioned this before, but sometimes I put books on hold at the library and then by the time they come up I’ve completely forgotten what they were or how I heard of them. For instance: I have absolutely no concept of how I came across the book and in fact I got maybe a quarter into it thinking it must be a reissue of some sort because the writing had a certain… heft? to it that caused me to think it was older. (It is not; it came out this year.) I had never heard of Margot Livesey—well I guess I had in the sense that I put this book on hold at some point for some reason, but not otherwise—and looking her up I discover she’s a writer in her seventies with an astonishingly prolific writing career.

I don’t have any explanations …