Margot Livesey. (2016). Mercury: A Novel. HarperCollins.

Margot Livesey. 2016. Mercury: A Novel. HarperCollins.

Margot Livesey, Mercury: A Novel. HarperCollins, 2016.

Margot Livesey. Mercury: A Novel. HarperCollins, 2016.

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     Margot Livesey is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Flight of Gemma Hardy, The House on Fortune Street, Banishing Verona, Eva Moves the Furniture, The Missing World, Criminals, and Homework. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Vogue, and the Atlantic, and she is the recipient of grants from both the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. The House on Fortune Street won the 2009 L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award. Born in Scotland, Livesey currently lives in the Boston area and is a professor of fiction at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

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Mercury

fullDescription

Donald believes he knows all there is to know about seeing. An optometrist in suburban Boston, he is sure that he and his wife, Viv, who runs the local stables, are both devoted to their two children and to each other. Then Mercury—a gorgeous young thoroughbred with a murky past—arrives at Windy Hill and everything changes.

Mercury’s owner, Hilary, is a newcomer to town who has enrolled her daughter in riding lessons. When she brings Mercury to board at Windy Hill, everyone is struck by his beauty and prowess, particularly Viv. As she rides him, Viv begins to dream of competing again, embracing the ambitions that she had harbored, and relinquished, as a young woman. Her daydreams soon morph into consuming desire, and her infatuation with the thoroughbred escalates to obsession.

Donald may have 20/20 vision but he is slow to notice how profoundly Viv has changed and how these changes threaten their quiet, secure world. By the time he does, it is too late to stop the catastrophic collision of Viv’s ambitions and his own myopia.

At once a tense psychological drama and a taut emotional thriller exploring love, obsession, and the deceits that pull a family apart, Mercury is a riveting tour de force that showcases this “searingly intelligent writer at the height of her powers” (Jennifer Egan).  

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: The New Yorker
   • content:

     "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...

2. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     July 11, 2016
     Livesey’s latest (following The Flight of Gemma Hardy) is a fiercely intelligent exploration of the ways blindness—to ourselves, others, and the power of passion and grief—can divide and transform us. After his father dies of Parkinson’s, optometrist Donald Stevenson’s reserve deepens into what Viv, his wife of nine years, likens to the airless impenetrability of an astronaut’s suit. Viv’s teenage dreams of equestrian competition resurface when Mercury, an exceptionally promising thoroughbred, comes to board at the suburban Boston stable she helps run. Donald; Viv’s boss, Claudia; and Mercury’s owner, Hilary, assume that Viv accepts the obvious: Mercury is not hers to risk, compete on, or control. Facing their resistance to her growing obsession and increasingly distanced from Donald, Viv conceals the time and money she lavishes on the horse. When the stable is repeatedly broken into, she fears that telling Claudia or Hilary will lead to Mercury’s removal. Instead, she buys a gun. Seen primarily from Donald’s muffled, sometimes pedantic perspective, the novel unfolds patiently, through a chain of small and mostly well-intentioned deceptions that nevertheless yield catastrophe. Livesey’s skillful play with the title’s many meanings—trickster god of speed, diagnostic aid, minor planet, deadly poison—gives her narrative a rich imagery that interweaves seamlessly with its textured evocation of everyday life.

3. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     April 15, 2016
     

     Following The Flight of Gemma Hardy, a New York Times best seller in paperback that greatly boosted Livesey's sales record, this novel stars a beautiful thoroughbred named Mercury, newly boarded at the suburban Boston stable run by Viv.

     Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

4. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from June 1, 2016
     Another probing study of the way character shapes our destinies from the author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy (2012), etc.It's perhaps a bit much to make Donald an optometrist, given that he confesses shortly after disclosing his occupation that he failed to see wife Viv's obsession with a horse named Mercury until it was much too late. But Livesey, a Scottish transplant whose brilliant novels are underknown in her adopted country, rings so many dazzling changes on the subjects of eyesight, hindsight, and blinkered sight that she may be forgiven the whiff of contrivance in her setup. Donald's personality is utterly credible: cautious, precise, Scottish-ly phlegmatic yet roiled by deep feelings of loss. They go back to boyhood, when his family's move from Edinburgh to Boston cost Donald his best friend, and have been elevated to devastating levels by the recent death of his father after a long siege of Parkinson's disease. The intensity of Donald's attachment to his father is palpable but never really explained; Livesey has a healthy respect for the mysteries of the human heart. Viv, who narrates the novel's middle section, is rendered with somewhat less nuance: her lifelong need to be the best, focused on riding in adolescence and only temporarily derailed to a career in mutual funds, re-emerges with a scary edge when Mercury arrives at the stable she now runs with her best friend, Claudia. It's hard to be entirely sympathetic when she tells Donald (accurately), "Since your dad died you've been MIA," as we see Viv driven into secrecy and lies by her hysterical need to make Mercury a champion and herself a star. But Donald also keeps secrets, one of which contributes to a ghastly act of misdirected violence that leads to a dance of regret, recrimination, and indecision bringing further losses for husband and wife. A sharply sketched supporting cast adds to the depth and cumulative power of this grimly great novel. Uncharacteristically dark, yet more evidence of Livesey's formidable gifts.

     COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

5. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     July 1, 2016
     Obsession can take even the most ordinary of lives and twist it into something irredeemably unrecognizable. Hillary is a single mother who has come into possession of her deceased brother's Thoroughbred racehorse, Mercury, and decides to board the stallion at Viv Stephenson's stables. Talk about love at first sight. A wife and mother, but, most of all, a lapsed equestrian, Viv sees in Mercury her second chance at a competitive career, one she's willing to pursue at the cost of her marriage and family. Paranoid about real and imagined threats to Mercury, Viv buys a black-market gun and has opportunity to use it the night Viv's optician husband, Donald, brings Hillary and his best friend, Jack, to the stables after hours so Hillary can visit her horse. Mistaking them for intruders, Viv shoots and severely wounds Jack. Told from both Donald's and Viv's perspectives, best-selling Livesey's (The Flight of Gemma Hardy, 2012) 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

6. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     September 1, 2016
     

     Winner of the 2016 Bard Fiction Prize for You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, Kleeman returns with 12 edgy stories that have a surreal, even primal feel. A young woman, sitting in a dining room with her parents, is confused by the increasing number of unrecognizable men (one murderous) claiming to be her suitors, while a dancing-master in an unspecified time and place is smugly convinced that his art can civilize a feral lad who's staggered into the village. Elsewhere, a journalist fails to connect with a man she's met while trying to write a story about a dairy farmer, and meteorological events have a scattered impact on family in a too-fragmented narrative. VERDICT Disturbing and fantastical in concept if not in language, these stories have the same disaffected feel as Kleeman's novel and won't convince all readers. For Kleeman fans. [See Prepub Alert, 3/21/16.]

     Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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Donald believes he knows all there is to know about seeing. An optometrist in suburban Boston, he is sure that he and his wife, Viv, who runs the local stables, are both devoted to their two children and to each other. Then Mercury—a gorgeous young thoroughbred with a murky past—arrives at Windy Hill and everything changes.

Mercury’s owner, Hilary, is a newcomer to town who has enrolled her daughter in riding lessons. When she brings Mercury to board at Windy Hill, everyone is struck by his beauty and prowess, particularly Viv. As she rides him, Viv begins to dream of competing again, embracing the ambitions that she had harbored, and relinquished, as a young woman. Her daydreams soon morph into consuming desire, and her infatuation with the thoroughbred escalates to obsession.

Donald may have 20/20 vision but he is slow to notice how profoundly Viv has changed and how these changes threaten their quiet, secure world. By the time he does, it is too...

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