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    Banishing Verona: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Banishing Verona: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Banishing Verona: A Novel
    Ebook408 pages5 hours

    Banishing Verona: A Novel

    By Margot Livesey

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    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?

    Deftly plotted and filled with unexpected twists, Livesey's 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" (Alice Sebold).

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateSep 1, 2005
    ISBN9781466815223
    Unavailable
    Banishing Verona: A Novel
    Author

    Margot Livesey

    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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    Reviews for Banishing Verona

    3.5/5

    59 ratings6 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Author Margot Livesey never fails to surprise and impress me. This is a love story -- the prinicipal characters are Zeke, a thirtysomething house painter with Asperger's and Verona, a radio journalist who is seven months pregnant. They spend most of the book apart, trying to reconnect, getting distracted, missing each other. But along the way they -- and we -- encounter a variety of memorable secondary characters -- friends, strangers, relatives. The book is very much about family, about adult relatives trying to deal with one another -- that push-and-pull thing we do -- trying to stay close, trying to be independent, redefining roles, making mistakes, feeling guilty, being made to feel guilty, forgiving, needing to be forgiven, never quite getting it right, then, when we least expect it, doing the one thing that, for a moment at least, makes everything exactly right. I think Livesey does a masterful job of writing about those relationships. The book is a love story on so many levels, involving so many people. The intricacies of character, of relationships, are so finely drawn. It's the quality I admired when I first read Livesey, in "Eva Moves the Furniture". In his journey to find Verona, Zeke meets a woman who is trying to learn a new word each day. That idea appeals to Zeke who likes words, likes plans. But it is Verona who gives us the best word in the book. Describing Verona's feelings for Zeke, the author writes: "She had never felt so fully apprehended by another person." It is the perfect word and it worked on me throughout the rest of the book, coloring so many of the relationships, adding another layer of meaning and insight.
    • 5/5
      Had I not enjoyed this author's previous books I doubt I'd have bothered with this one as the description makes it out to be a light, romantic piece of chick-lit. It does have romantic themes but romance is only a small part of the story.

      While I enjoyed the book I was a bit distracted by several points in the narrative:

      - A character who has gone through chemotherapy refers to a tattoo as part of their treatment. To the best of my knowledge, it's radiotherapy that requires the addition of a tattoo to the treatment site.

      - By 2004 I'm fairly sure it was not permitted to bring bottles of water through airport security.

      - The female character, who is pregnant, has left her home in a hurry in fear for her life yet she for some reason thinks to find and pack condoms.

      - This female character then ends up in bed with the male character and manages to find the condoms she has packed, yet on two later pages we are given a description of the sheets' appearance which shouldn't be possible under the circumstances.

      Those points aside, it's a good read.
    • 5/5
      Having just finished "The House on Fortune Street" I wanted to provide a brief review of Margot Livesey's "Banishing Verona," which absorbed me during the winter of 2004. At the time, my son was living in London on a semester abroad, and we live in the Boston area, so the dual locales of the story were an immediate draw. As she did so skillfully in "Criminials" and "The Missing World", Ms. Livesey deftly draws us into the inner thoughts and often peculiar motives of her characters, and creates pitch-perfect sense of place no matter where her story takes us - Scotland, London, Boston. Her narratives are filled with suspense because they are so remarkably plausible - bizarre situations and often disastrous decisions which would border on the absurd were her characters not so accessible to us. She leads us through a complex and fascinating labrynth with Zeke, Verona, their friends and family, and to a thoroughly satisfying conclusion which ties all threads together. The publication of Ms. Livesey's newest work will undoubtedly create a bump of interest in her backlist - I'm sure those who are just discovering her through House on Fortune Street will be delighted to follow up with Banishing Verona, where she's at the top of her game.
    • 4/5
      Liked this story a lot. I had real empathy for the male main character, Zeke. Verona was also a very interesting character. Their finding each other, seemed very poignant.
    • 4/5
      Lovely and twisty tale of a man who can't remember faces goes looking for a woman who doesn't want to be found, because though he can't remember what she looks like and he did get her name, he loves her. Very sweet.
    • 4/5
      My friend Kristi gave me this book, pointing out that it is about two of our favorite cities, London and Boston. Indeed, the book takes place in both locations and I enjoyed traveling through the geography of both, and spotting familiar places along the way.The story is interesting enough, but the constant distance between the two main characters (which I think is meant to be the hook for this book) became tiresome to me as the chapters wore on.Verona, a 7-months pregnant radio talkshow host has a one-night tryst with Zeke, a handsome house painter, who struggles with social situations due to Asperger's syndrome (a mild form of autism). They meet under highly unlikely circumstances and fall in love. Then Verona disappears. The rest of the novel involves the two lovers trying to get back together.In fact, Zeke and Verona only appear together in 3 or four scenes. This is an interesting concept, but, in the end not as compelling as I would have hoped. I never felt enthralled by the story or the characters.An okay book, but not a great one. (Sorry, Geekface. Didn't love it.)