Consuming.... Explores themes of honesty and understanding by showing the impact that obsessions—grief, rapacity—can have on a marriage.” — The New Yorker
“You’ll be glued to the page.” — People , Pick of the Week
“Livesey knows her way around human desire and disappointment. Like the recent blockbusters GONES GIRL and FATES AND FURIES, MERCURY gives us a marriage from alternating perspectives. Unlike those books, there is no looming gimmick or twist. The parties involved agree on what has happened. The question is whether or not their love can survive it.” — New York Times
“Margot Livesey should be better known.... [She] writes as well as anyone and is clearly steeped in the literary canon.... She’s a patient builder of complex characters who are often brought face to face with uncomfortable truths about themselves.” — Mark Kamine, Wall Street Journal
“MERCURY explores that thrilling, terrifying moment when grief turns blind, when passion becomes obsession. As always, Livesey tells her tale masterfully, with intelligence, tenderness and a shrewd understanding of all our mercurial human impulses.” — Lily King, author of EUPHORIA
“Livesey’s prose has a brusque sensuality. It reads lucid and forthright and lean.... Livesey roots tension not just in the bones but the very marrow of the book.” — Leah Hager Cohen, Boston Globe
“Delving into the subtler miscommunications of even the most intertwined lives… [MERCURY] underlines the small efforts people make to carve out autonomy within a marriage.” — Chloe Schama, New York Times Book Review
“Step by step, Livesey brilliantly assembles a truly painful and frightening picture of delusion.... I cannot in good conscience reveal more of the plot. I came to this story in a state of innocence, and I feel that its terrific power depended in great part on the gradual unfolding of unlooked-for events.” — Katherine A. Powers, Barnes and Noble review
“MERCURY is a haunting, meticulous inquiry into the nature of blindness-its insidious power to corrupt marital trust, even between those with perfect vision. Margot Livesey is a searingly intelligent writer at the height of her powers.” — Jennifer Egan, author of A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD
“A fiercely intelligent exploration of the ways blindness — to ourselves, others, and the power of passion and grief — can divide us and transform us.... Livesey’s skillful play with the title’s many meanings... gives her narrative a rich imagery that interweaves seamlessly with its textured evocation of everyday life.” — Publishers Weekly
“MERCURY is as luminous, unforgettable, and perfectly rendered as only Margot Livesey can accomplish. I only wished it were twice as long.” — Dennis Lehane, author of WORLD GONE BY
“The mid-life crisis takes many forms, some familiar, some wildly unexpected. Livesey, in her riveting novel MERCURY, portrays a couple in their season of crisis. Patiently, precisely, she unfolds the layers of their drama, at once quiet and extreme. She’ll make you wonder how well you know your spouse.” — Claire Messud, author of THE WOMAN UPSTAIRS
“Gripping.” — New York Post
“A probing morality study that chips away at the age-old question: Would you turn in a loved one if you knew they did something reprehensible? Better yet: When, if ever, is it OK to lie?” — Alexis Burling, San Francisco Chronicle
“Thrilling.” — Helen T. Verongos, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Fast-paced, with the feel of life as lived….In Livesey, as in Chekhov, when a gun turns up in a domestic drama, it’s bound to go off.” — Dan DeLuca, Philly Inquirer
“The inimitable Margot Livesey has written an unforgettable story of a couple in the midst of their marriage’s dissolution. No one has a better understanding of human nature.” — Lit Hub
“This remarkable, powerful novel takes its title from a horse: a beautiful, dapple-gray thoroughbred that becomes the object of obsession and the pivotal point of author Margot Livesey’s richly complex story.” — Melinda Bargreen, The Seattle Times
“A page-turner.” — Anne Kniggendorf, Kansas City Star
“No one plumbs the depths of ordinary human folly and its consequences like the brilliantly perceptive Margot Livesey. Be prepared: MERCURY will take you on quite a ride.” — Julia Glass, author of AND THE DARK SACRED NIGHT
“An enigmatic, unhappy marriage is at the center of Livesey’s ninth novel..... Secrets and lies lurk in the background.” — Newsday
“MERCURY demonstrates Tolstoy’s dictum: all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. The Stevensons find themselves upended by a horse — a magnificent horse that sets off a chain of deceit and crime. This powerful novel reveals the fragility of life when tested by the shock of genuine passion.” — Ben Fountain, author of BILLY LYNN'S LONG HALFTIME WALK
“[A] probing study of the way character shapes our destinies.… Livesey, a Scottish transplant whose brilliant novels are underknown in her adopted country…. A sharply sketched supporting cast adds to the depth and cumulative power… yet more evidence of Livesey’s formidable gifts.” — Kirkus , starred review
“Livesey’s story of loyalty, deceit, ambition, and moral ambiguity is a read-in-one-sitting, sublimely nuanced psychological exploration of personal ethics and responsibility ideal for book-discussion groups.” — Carol Haggas, Booklist
“Livesey has a penchant for creating a sense of foreboding in her novels.... A tangled morality tale not about a horse but about a marriage and friendships disintegrating under the steady drip of secrets and half-truths.” — Sally Bissell, Library Journal
“Multi-layered domestic dramas are Margot Livesey’s specialty. In Mercury , she again probes contradictions in human relationships, this time orbiting the often perilous abyss of middle age and casting her gaze on matters of perception in both literal and figurative terms.” — Shelf Awareness
MERCURY is as luminous, unforgettable, and perfectly rendered as only Margot Livesey can accomplish. I only wished it were twice as long.
MERCURY demonstrates Tolstoy’s dictum: all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. The Stevensons find themselves upended by a horse — a magnificent horse that sets off a chain of deceit and crime. This powerful novel reveals the fragility of life when tested by the shock of genuine passion.
Livesey’s story of loyalty, deceit, ambition, and moral ambiguity is a read-in-one-sitting, sublimely nuanced psychological exploration of personal ethics and responsibility ideal for book-discussion groups.
Gripping.
Consuming.... Explores themes of honesty and understanding by showing the impact that obsessions—grief, rapacity—can have on a marriage.
Livesey knows her way around human desire and disappointment. Like the recent blockbusters Gone Girl and Fates and Furies , Mercury gives us a marriage from alternating perspectives. Unlike those books, there is no looming gimmick or twist. The parties involved agree on what has happened. The question is whether or not their love can survive it.
Consuming.... Explores themes of honesty and understanding by showing the impact that obsessions-grief, rapacity-can have on a marriage.
Livesey has a penchant for creating a sense of foreboding in her novels.... A tangled morality tale not about a horse but about a marriage and friendships disintegrating under the steady drip of secrets and half-truths.
No one plumbs the depths of ordinary human folly and its consequences like the brilliantly perceptive Margot Livesey. Be prepared: MERCURY will take you on quite a ride.
MERCURY explores that thrilling, terrifying moment when grief turns blind, when passion becomes obsession. As always, Livesey tells her tale masterfully, with intelligence, tenderness and a shrewd understanding of all our mercurial human impulses.
The mid-life crisis takes many forms, some familiar, some wildly unexpected. Livesey, in her riveting novel MERCURY, portrays a couple in their season of crisis. Patiently, precisely, she unfolds the layers of their drama, at once quiet and extreme. She’ll make you wonder how well you know your spouse.
MERCURY is a haunting, meticulous inquiry into the nature of blindness-its insidious power to corrupt marital trust, even between those with perfect vision. Margot Livesey is a searingly intelligent writer at the height of her powers.
Mercury is Margot Livesey's eighth novel, and just like the previous seven, it is completely different from its predecessors. Her books have been peopled by a most variegated lot, among them an evil child, a lunatic, a blackmailer, an amnesiac, a control freak, a couple of ghosts, and, last time, in The Flight of Gemma Hardy, a mid-twentieth-century version of Jane Eyre . Now we find ourselves sucked deep into the lives of an optometrist, his equestrian wife, and their two children. Scottish-born Donald Stevenson was brought to this country by his parents when he was ten, a temporary move that turned permanent. It was wrenching, above all because it separated him from his best friend, a boy he finally stopped writing to when he had to admit that he wasn't coming back. Throwing up barriers, we discover, is Donald's way of dealing with painful emotions. Now he's a grown man but once again in a state of shuttered bereavement, this time for his father, who died fairly recently from Parkinson's disease. We learn that Donald has, in fact, shaped the last several years of his and his family's life around his father's decline. He moved them all to be closer to his parents, gave up the medical discipline of ophthalmology for optometry with its shorter, more predictable hours, and visited the increasingly disabled man as often as possible. On the distaff side of this tale is Donald's wife, Viv, who left a well-paying job in mutual funds to run a stable with her friend Claudia, a business she loves though it pays peanuts. Like her husband, she, too, has a devastating loss in her past, that of an adored horse who had to be put down as a result of her own mistakes in training. Now she has fallen in love with Mercury, a beautiful thoroughbred boarded at the stable and owned by a woman called Hilary. Hilary, not a horsewoman herself, is glad to have someone exercise the creature, which has come to her via an inheritance with its own tragic details. Other crucial characters spin off their own little side plots, all of which converge on the fateful main one. Claudia, Viv's partner, is involved with a married man; Hilary, the owner of Mercury, falls in love with Jack, one of Donald's former patients, now blind. There is also a young stable girl, Charlie, who has become as smitten with Mercury as Viv has and that cannot bode well. While Donald flounders in grief, Viv becomes increasingly intoxicated by the dream that she can redo the past and train a champion: "I was going to ride him to victory . . . I was going to fulfill the promise of my second life." She neglects her family, throws around money they cannot afford to spend, and becomes paranoid that harm will come to the horse. Those fears grow as she detects that someone has visited the horse in the night. Still, Viv loses sight of what should be the most disquieting fact of all: Mercury does not actually belong to her. Step by step, Livesey brilliantly assembles a truly painful and frightening picture of delusion. A sequence of fateful acts follow, leading to tragedy and a terrible moral conundrum. Most of the novel is presented as an account written by Donald after the fact, but as he is the most judicious of narrators, he includes a long letter from Viv. This allows her to offer her version, one that fills in emotional detail not Donald's strong suit. His manner of narration has a nineteenth-century Caledonian air, one marked by a knell of dark foreboding. He points to incidents that would turn out to have dire repercussions and to the signs he missed of coming disaster. He was blind, he sees now, to what was going on around him. It is a failing made almost ludicrous considering that his prize possession, his totem, really, is a model of an eye, twelve times the size of an actual one. "[W]e think we see with our eyes," he explains to a patient, "but really we see with our brains." In addition to sight or lack of it the novel's other governing motif is Mercury, the implications and connotations of which are thoroughly unpacked by the diligent Donald he's that kind of guy and Livesey is that kind of writer. There's Mercury the horse, the swiftest of the gods and their messenger, and mercury the element that, as Donald reminds himself, is a poison that causes death and - - yes blindness. And there is Mercury, the planet and part of a system of bodies, each affecting the others. Donald gets all this going, trying to figure out, in his weirdly analytic way, how to understand his life and that of those around him. These strands of allusion and connotation some as subtle as gossamer, some as conspicuous as a hawser contribute to the novel's deftly manipulated tension. I cannot in good conscience reveal more of the plot. I came to this story in a state of innocence, and I feel that its terrific power depended in great part on the gradual unfolding of unlooked-for events. So, I leave this pleasure for you to experience in its unadulterated form. Katherine A. Powers reviews books widely and has been a finalist for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. She is the editor of Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942–1963.
Reviewer: Katherine A. Powers
The Barnes & Noble Review
…Ms. Livesey knows her way around human desire and disappointment. Like the recent blockbusters Gone Girl and Fates and Furies, Mercury gives us a marriage from alternating perspectives. Unlike those books, there is no looming gimmick or twist. The parties involved agree on what has happened. The question is whether or not their love can survive it.
The New York Times - John Williams
Consuming.... Explores themes of honesty and understanding by showing the impact that obsessions—grief, rapacity—can have on a marriage.
You’ll be glued to the page.
Margot Livesey should be better known.... [She] writes as well as anyone and is clearly steeped in the literary canon.... She’s a patient builder of complex characters who are often brought face to face with uncomfortable truths about themselves.
Delving into the subtler miscommunications of even the most intertwined lives… [MERCURY] underlines the small efforts people make to carve out autonomy within a marriage.
Livesey’s prose has a brusque sensuality. It reads lucid and forthright and lean.... Livesey roots tension not just in the bones but the very marrow of the book.
Livesey knows her way around human desire and disappointment. Like the recent blockbusters GONES GIRL and FATES AND FURIES, MERCURY gives us a marriage from alternating perspectives. Unlike those books, there is no looming gimmick or twist. The parties involved agree on what has happened. The question is whether or not their love can survive it.
Step by step, Livesey brilliantly assembles a truly painful and frightening picture of delusion.... I cannot in good conscience reveal more of the plot. I came to this story in a state of innocence, and I feel that its terrific power depended in great part on the gradual unfolding of unlooked-for events.
A page-turner.
Thrilling.
A probing morality study that chips away at the age-old question: Would you turn in a loved one if you knew they did something reprehensible? Better yet: When, if ever, is it OK to lie?
Fast-paced, with the feel of life as lived….In Livesey, as in Chekhov, when a gun turns up in a domestic drama, it’s bound to go off.
The inimitable Margot Livesey has written an unforgettable story of a couple in the midst of their marriage’s dissolution. No one has a better understanding of human nature.
An enigmatic, unhappy marriage is at the center of Livesey’s ninth novel..... Secrets and lies lurk in the background.
This remarkable, powerful novel takes its title from a horse: a beautiful, dapple-gray thoroughbred that becomes the object of obsession and the pivotal point of author Margot Livesey’s richly complex story.
Multi-layered domestic dramas are Margot Livesey’s specialty. In Mercury , she again probes contradictions in human relationships, this time orbiting the often perilous abyss of middle age and casting her gaze on matters of perception in both literal and figurative terms.
Gripping.
09/01/2016 Donald and Viv, at a turning point in their marriage, are implementing all the changes they once eschewed. Leaving Boston and Viv's high-powered career behind, they relocate to the suburbs, where Donald, an optometrist, opens his own practice and Viv can indulge her long-subsumed passion for horses. Training riders at Windy Hill stables affords Viv time for their two children and for Donald's dad, who has Parkinson's. But from the moment Mercury trots into the paddock, locking eyes with Viv, there's a seismic shift in the atmosphere. Livesey (The Flight of Gemma Hardy) has a penchant for creating a sense of foreboding in her novels, and readers who recall that Mercury was the Roman god who led souls to the underworld will not be surprised when Viv's behavior turns uncharacteristically quixotic. Literally and figuratively, the symbolism of blindness weighs heavily on this narrative. Enhancing the vision is Donald's trade, yet he fails to perceive that Viv's obsession with the thoroughbred, and their inability to communicate about it, will result in catastrophe. VERDICT A prolific author and esteemed professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Livesey has written a tangled morality tale not about a horse but about a marriage and friendships disintegrating under the steady drip of secrets and half-truths. There's plenty for discussion here. [See Prepub Alert, 3/21/16.]—Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL
Margot Livesey’s latest work explores blindness in both its literal and figurative manifestations. Narrator Derek Perkins performs wonderfully as Donald, a Scotsman who is transplanted to Boston. Donald is an ophthalmologist with perfect vision—except where his wife, Viv, is concerned. Donald fails to notice Viv’s obsession with Mercury, a thoroughbred stallion she believes is her chance to make a name for herself. Narrator Nicol Zanzarella delivers Viv’s sections in an agitated, sincere tone that is perfect for the high-strung middle-aged woman whose insights never touch on her own personal problems. Perkins and Zanzarella deliver convincing performances as a violent act brings devastation in this convoluted drama, which is less about a horse than about the erosion of trust due to secrets, lies, and willful blindness. Intense listening. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine