Banishing Verona: Summary and book reviews of Banishing Verona by Margot Livesey, plus links to an excerpt from Banishing Verona and a biography of Margot Livesey.
Banishing Verona
by Margot Livesey
Hardcover: Nov 2004,
336 pages.
Paperback: Sep 2005,
384 pages.
A couple begins an intense affair, only to be separated abruptly -- and perhaps irrevocably -- in this surprising, suspenseful love story.
Zeke is twenty-nine, a man who looks like a Raphael angel and who earns his living as a painter and carpenter in London. He reads the world a little differently from most people and has trouble with such ordinary activities as lying, deciphering expressions, recognizing faces. Verona is thirty-seven, confident, hot-tempered, a modestly successful radio show host, unmarried, and seven months pregnant. When the two meet in a house that Zeke is renovating, they fall in love, only to be separated less than twenty-four hours later when Verona leaves abruptly, without explanation, for Boston.
Both Zeke and Verona, it turns out, have complications in their lives, though not of a romantic kind. Verona's involve her brother, Henry, who is tied up in shady financial dealings. Zeke's father has had a heart attack and his mother is threatening to run away with her lover, all of which puts pressure on Zeke to take over the family grocery business. And yet he finds himself following Verona to Boston. As he pursues her, and she pursues Henry, both are forced to ask the perplexing question: Can we ever know another person?
New York Newsday
In her delightful new novel, Margot Livesey presents us with an axiom that never gets within spitting distance of the QED Other people are essentially unknowable, therefore the only way to know another person is through love at first sight. Livesey's romantic formula proves that a good novel has nothing to do with good logic.
Entertainment Weekly Banishing Verona captures the magic of an unlikely young romance...(Livesey's) love-struck protagonists meet just twice...but their longing for each other, tender, mutual, and inexplicable, is this lovely book's powerful underlying chord. Grade A-
Elle
A suspenseful, satisfying love story...One of Livesey's greatest gifts is a quiet, lyrical authority that makes it easy for readers to follow her anywhere, and believe in the journey every step of the way.
O Magazine
How can we trust in love? Everyone in Livesey's spirited cast has to figure out an answer to that question, and nothing could give me more pleasure than eavesdropping on them while they do.
Kirkus Reviews
...Livesey constructs another of her reflective but surprisingly gripping tales about odd people in peculiar circumstances that nonetheless reveal a great deal about human nature....Like all Livesey's novels notable for her penetrating knowledge of the human heart coupled with respect for its essential mysteries, both explored in elegant, evocative prose.
Booklist - Carol Haggas
Told from the parallel viewpoints of her wistful hero and his winsome heroine, Livesey's unlikely yet enchanting romance poignantly reveals the mysterious machinations of the human heart.
Publishers Weekly
As Livesey gently probes the depths of longing, betrayal and forgiveness, her gift for creating sublimely unexpected sentences is abundantly on display.... Moments like these are ghosts that dance in the reader's vision long after the photographer's flashbulb has popped.
Library Journal - Mary Margaret Benson
This gem of a novel manages to be funny, frightening, and upbeat all at the same time. Highly recommended.
Alice Sebold
Deftly plotted and filled with unexpected twists, Banishing Verona marks the arrival of another lyrical and wise novel from a writer whose work radiates with compassion and intelligence and always, deliciously, mystery
Julia Glass, author of Three Junes Banishing Verona reminds me just why Margot Livesey is one of my favorite contemporary writers, those who keep the novel alive and vividly engaging. For her keen wit and wise heart, for her mingling of the tender with the diabolical -- never mind her knack for holding the reader in thrall to a suspenseful story -- she is a master, pure and simple.
Diane Johnson, author of L'Affaire
Margot Livesey's is such a personal, endearing, sharp voice, and this is a sly, special and funny book.
Recent Reader Reviews
Rated of 5
by Beth
I absolutely loved this book! There were unexpected twists, and I enjoyed the story being told from both Zeke and Verona's perspective. I am looking forward to starting Eva Moves the Furniture, and I have bought all of her other novels. I am so... Read More
About the author:
Margot Livesey is the award-winning author of a number of books but is best
known for her 2001 novel, Eva Moves the Furniture; She was born in
Scotland and currently lives in the Boston area, where she is writer in
residence at Emerson College.
Related Links: Autism is believed to effect
about 1.5 million Americans. For information about autism in general, try the Autism Society of
America, and for Asberger's in particular I recommend a section of the University of
Delaware's website maintained by OASIS (Online Asberger Syndrome Information
& Support).
Jason Stafford is a former Wall Street hotshot who made some bad moves, paid the price with two years in prison, and is now trying to put his life back together. He's unemployable, until an investment firm asks him to look into possible problems left by a junior trader who died recently in an accident. What he discovers is big - there are...
'Haddon's portrayal of an emotionally dissociated mind is a superb achievement. He is a wise and bleakly funny writer with rare gifts of empathy.'
These are 2 of the 7 readalike suggestions for Banishing Verona. Members have full access to all readalikes. If you are a member, please login. To find out more about membership, click here.
A bold, mesmerizing novel about the woman known as "Typhoid Mary," the first known healthy carrier of typhoid fever in the burgeoning metropolis of early twentieth century New York.
Two Lives is a memoir written by international best-selling author, Vikram Seth. In this interesting and engaging book, Seth writes about his great...
read more
Z, the novel about the life of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald is at points charming and; like another reviewer, I kept thinking of the movie, "Midnight...
read more
Although heavy on the scientific details, which slowed down the story for me (OK, I admit, I was one of those liberal arts majors who skipped out on...
read more
Judge rules unused Borders gift cards to be worthless(May 23 2013) Borders owes nothing to holders of roughly $210.5 million of gift cards that had not been used by the time the bookstore chain shut down, a Manhattan federal...
Full Story
BookBrowse
(482 words).
Alice Sebold
of 5
by Beth
Write your own review!
