The Road From Belhaven by Margot Livesey

This is a quiet book, set in Victorian Scotland, where the author returns to the life of her mother, who led a hard scrabble life replete with unappealing choices, the gift of second sight, and who died young. Lizzie can see see events that have yet to happen, but she cannot change them and she knows well enough that sharing her gift with others will lead to trouble. It is a time of superstition, and seeing the future is equated with the devil rather than as a gift from God. She makes quite a few mistakes, including the one where she believes the man she loves that he will marry her, only to find herself abandoned once she falls pregnant. The rest of the book flows from the subsequent choices that she makes as a result of this error in judgement, and what she does to survive, hide her secret, and find her way back to her child. In a time when America is populated by a large group of people who want to go back to a time when women have no reproductive choices in order to better control them makes this story more poignant. The patriarchy is alive and well, and while that used to annoy me, it now makes me very angry, and thus harder to relax and enjoy this story, which is well written and atmospheric.