Criminals

by Margot Livesey

Overview

Margot Livesey's early novel Criminals is the story of adult brother and sister Ewan and Mollie and their decision to rescue an abandoned child. But is the child being rescued by these two, or abducted? Where is the line between moral and criminal behavior? Livesey paints a thrilling and devastating portrait of two people blinded by need and the desire for betterment.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312424695
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	10/01/2005
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.64(d)

About the Author

Margot Livesey is the author of several novels, including Homework and Eva Moves the Furniture, as well as the story collection Learning By Heart. Born in Scotland, she lives in Boston, Massachusetts, where she is the writer in residence at Emerson College.

Hometown:

Boston, Massachusetts

Date of Birth:

July 24, 1953

Place of Birth:

Perth, Scotland

Education:

B.A. in English and philosophy from the University of York, England

Editorial Reviews

A wonderful novel, impeccably written and thoroughly engrossing.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Where do love, honesty, and responsibility intersect? . . . A provocative rumination on family and what it means to do the right thing.” —Glamour

“Funny, suspenseful, and sometimes creepy.” —Los Angeles Times

“One of the most surprising thrillers of the year—completely offbeat, unexpected, and unique. Margot Livesey is right up there in the realm of P. D. James.” —Newsday

“A story of many kinds of love, indifference, secrecy, and blind selfishness that drives as fiercely to its surprising conclusion as any thriller.” —Rosellen Brown

From the Publisher

``Banker finds Baby in Bus station'' is the caption that uptight London bachelor Ewan Munro ruefully realizes will describe events in this intriguing novel about the banality of evil. Discovering a swaddled infant in a lavatory stall in Perth, Ewan almost absentmindedly takes the baby to his unstable sister, Mollie Lafferty, intending to call the authorities once he arrives at her home. Mollie is in a bad way; she has split with her novelist husband, anguished because he has fictionalized her in his current novel, and, she thinks, given away secrets she didn't even realize she harbored. (Chunks of this novel are interpolated as Ewan reads it, adding tension to a narrative already taut with frightening implications.) For Mollie now recognizes that her great need is to have a child, and she conspires to keep the baby. Meanwhile, the child's feckless father, an amoral layabout called Kenneth, who has impetuously abandoned his daughter, realizes that he can extort money when he shows up to claim her; and her mother, a nurse from Bombay, becomes distraught at the infant's disappearance. Scottish-born Livesey (Homework) controls the narrative with assurance, gradually laying bare the bedrock of her characters' inner lives. One reads with fascinated attention as Ewan and Mollie-he preoccupied by a lapse in his meticulously moral behavior that has made him complicit in illegal trading; she sliding into emotional breakdown-discover how easy it is to become criminals. Livesey maintains a low-key style that perfectly matches the way ordinary lives can slip into chaos; her elegantly simple prose, her control of pacing and characterization and her insights into human behavior combine to produce a fascinating narrative. 50,000 first printing; Literary Guild selection. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In this latest from Scotswoman Livesey, author of the well-received Homework (LJ 12/89), an abandoned infant touches the lives of five very different people. A Literary Guild alternate.

Library Journal