Margot Livesey

In the Author's Words

"I was thrilled to publish Eva Moves the Furniture but it also left me somewhat adrift. For more than a decade, after the publication of each new novel, I had returned to working on Eva for a few months, before again giving up and moving on to a new project. So finally finishing the novel took me by surprise. I found myself returning to a long cherished character, a young man with Asperger's Syndrome, who had never quite found a place in any previous work.

"I became interested in Asperger's not only because the children of various friends had been diagnosed with this condition but also because it seemed like a wonderful lens through which to examine human behaviour. Two of the defining characteristics of Asperger's are difficulty with intimacy and an inability to grasp subtext: irony, humour, mendacity, hyperbole. I decided to put my character, Zeke, in the situation that is surely one of the ultimate tests of our grasp of subtext: falling in love. And who would be the object of his affections? It had to be someone very different from himself. Enter Verona, tall, plain, eight years older, seven months pregnant, and struggling with her n'er do well brother's complicated affairs."