Margot Livesey

In the Author's Words

"I was walking across Boston Common one snowy evening, on my way to teach at Emerson College, when across the street I saw a group of people at a bus stop, holding up pictures of babies. Between one step and the next I thought I'll write a novel about someone who finds a baby at a bus station. Then I thought but who should that person be? And at once I felt very strongly that it should be someone quite unlike me: a man, a banker. By this time I had almost reached the group of people and I saw that they were in fact a group of protesters outside an abortion clinic but the idea persisted. A few weeks later, when term was over, I went to the MacDowell Colony with my friend Andrea Barrett—she was working on her wonderful book Ship Fever—and I sat down and wrote a draft of Criminals."