S7 Ep. 21: The Road From Belhaven: Margot Livesey and What Literature Can Tell Us About The Future

fiction/non/fiction

As the 2024 Presidential race heats up, award-winning fiction writer Margot Livesey joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss the value of seeing the future in politics and in family life. Are the polls right? Will Donald Trump beat President Joe Biden in the November election? Livesey talks about the role predictions play in our political landscape and in her new novel, The Road from Belhaven, in which a young woman named Lizzie Craig, raised by her grandparents in 19th century Scotland, has the gift of second sight. Livesey discusses the ways that literature has handled the concept of “seeing the future” over time, including the role second sight plays in Macbeth. She reads from her novel.

To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/

This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

Margot Livesey

• The Road From Belhaven
• The Boy in the Field
• Homework
• Eva Moves The Furniture
• The Flight of Gemma Hardy

Others

• Daniel Deronda by George Eliot
• Fiction/Non/Fiction: Season 3, Episode 24: “Summer Books Extravaganza: Margot Livesey and Jaswinder Bolina on Beach Reading When the Beach is Closed”
• Fiction/Non/Fiction: Season 5, Episode 35: "Boris Johnson: Margot Livesey on British Politics, the Brexit Blunder, and the Prime Minister’s Lies"
• No Great Mischief by Alistair MacLeod
• The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan
• Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis
• Macbeth by William Shakespeare
• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
• Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
• L.M. Montgomery

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