Excerpt from The House on Fortune Street by Margot Livesey, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Giving up all pretense of reading, he set aside the paper and studied his friend. In his gray linen shirt and expensive jeans, Valentine looked ready to hold forth, at a moment’s notice, on some television arts program. His canary yellow hair had darkened in the last few years, and his features, which when he was an undergraduate used to crowd the middle of his face, had now taken up their proper places between his square chin and his high forehead. Even in June, Sean noticed, he was already mysteriously tanned.

“Excellent,” said Valentine. Glancing up from the notebook, he twitched the corners of his mouth. After several more superlatives he hung up. “Well,” he said, rubbing his hands, “I think this calls for an early drink.”

He refused to say more until he had fetched a beer for Sean, and a gin and tonic for himself. Then he raised his glass and broke the news. His agent, Jane, had called to say that the Belladonna Society, a small but well-funded organization founded soon after the First World War, was commissioning a handbook for euthanasia. “They want to make the case for legalizing euthanasia and to give an overview of the medical stuff. They’ll provide most of the material but there’ll be some research and we’ll have to do interviews with medical personnel, relatives.”

As Valentine described the society’s proposal, the number of pages, and the pay, Sean felt a cold finger run down his spine. “But isn’t this like telling people how to kill themselves?” he said. “Isn’t it better not to know certain things?”

“I don’t think so.” Valentine swirled his gin and tonic. “As I understand it the information is out there anyway. Our job is to present it in the sanest, most lucid form. Just because you give someone a gun,” he added, his chin rising fractionally to meet Sean’s objections, “doesn’t mean they have to use it.”

“I think people usually do feel they have to use guns,” Sean said. “And I think whoever gave them the gun is partly responsible. Couldn’t Jane find us something else?” Feigning exasperation, or perhaps genuinely annoyed, Valentine popped his eyes, a trick that Sean had been observing for over a decade without being able to decide whether his friend could actually move his eyeballs, or if they bulged anyway and he merely flexed the lids. “Not immediately,” he said. “And I don’t see how I could ask her to. She worked hard to put this deal together. The society is paying surprisingly well.”

Faced with the compelling argument of his finances, not to mention Valentine’s, Sean was at a loss. How could he explain that any major decision had always felt to him like a kind of death, an irrevocable closing down of certain possibilities; he had no desire to spend his days in the company of people who really were making a fatal choice. Besides, Valentine had already changed the topic. Had Sean heard that one of their former tutors was doing a television series on utopian communities, beginning with medieval clerics and going all the way to Findhorn?

Excerpted from The House on Fortune Street by Margot Livesey. Copyright © 2008 by Margot Livesey. Excerpted by permission of Harper Collins Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.