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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Nov 2004, 336 pages
Paperback:
Sep 2005, 384 pages
Book Reviewed by:
BookBrowse Review Team
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?
Chapter One
He had replaced five lightbulbs that day and by late afternoon could not help anticipating the soft ping of the filament flying apart whenever he reached for a switch. The third time, the fixture in the hall, the thought zigzagged across his mind that these little explosions were a sign, like the two dogs he had come across in the autumn, greyhound and bulldog, locked together on the grassy slope of the local park. He had given them a wide berth; still, he had felt responsible when on the bus next day a man turned puce and fell to the floor. By the fifth bulb, though, he had relinquished superstition and was blaming London Electricity. Some irregularity in the current, some unexpected surge, was slaughtering the bulbs. He pictured a man at head office filling his idle minutes by pulling a lever. Meanwhile, hour by hour he emptied the upstairs rooms, slipping the bulbs from bedside lights and desk lamps.
He had just replaced the fifth bulb when the doorbell rang. ...
This is a love story with a twist - no easy answers, no assured happy ending.
(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
Full Review
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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.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).
More books by Margot Livesey
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