Full of likably flawed characters, ‘Road from Belhaven’ is a book to cherish

If you haven’t dived into the novels of Margot Livesey, her new “The Road from Belhaven” is an excellent place to start.

Honestly, any of them would be a great place to start — “The Boy in the Field” and “The Flight of Gemma Hardy” were my favorites before I read “Belhaven” — because the Scotswoman is such a graceful, distinctive writer. Mostly set in Scotland (although Livesey now lives in the U.S.), her books vividly convey the joys and sorrows of ordinary, usually rural, life but they also leave room for the extraordinary. Whether it’s extra-sensory perception or the gift of premonitions, Livesey knows the world is not always explicable to the beautiful, complicated humans who live in it.

Lizzie Craig is one of many endearing folks in “Belhaven,” an orphan who grows up with her loving but severe grandparents on a small farm. It seems like a drama-free way of life but it turns out there are secrets being kept (Lizzie has a sister whose existence she didn’t know of) and Lizzie occasionally has spells while feeding the chickens or trying her hand at sketching. For brief moments, she flashes a few weeks into the future and sees what will happen then, including a family illness and a disastrous fire.

Occasionally, Lizzie is able to use her premonitions to head off disaster, but one of the wisest things about Livesey’s book is that it insists that being able to (sometimes) predict the future won’t save messy, foolish humans from stumbling into it anyway. Lizzie doesn’t always interpret what she sees correctly, the few with whom she shares her secret powers don’t always believe in them and, even when she knows the disasters ahead, she makes big-time romantic and career mistakes.

Livesey has keen insight into the way people behave and she crafts lyrical, lucid sentences, but what’s best about her work is her understanding that magic and mystery are part of everyday life.

Lizzie’s gift is there from the opening sentence of “The Road from Belhaven,” a sentence in which even the missing comma perfectly captures the simple purity of the thought — “The summer she was ten she learned not to speak of it.” But there are so many other things for Lizzie to contend with, including that surprise sister and the hard work of a late-1800s farm and her crush on a Glaswegian who may not be worthy of her, that it’s easy to forget about the supernatural element of the book. Yes, Lizzie has premonitions, Livesey seems to be saying. Who doesn’t?

We’re so fully immersed in Lizzie’s world that we understand every move she makes, no matter how disastrous it is. “No, don’t do that,” you may find yourself saying two or nine times. But instead of leading you to toss the book in frustration, Livesey makes you want to give error-prone Lizzie a hug of comfort and recognition.

Livesey isn’t an unknown. She has received some big awards, she’s on the faculty of the Iowa Writers Workshop and her books are consistently reviewed. But “The Road from Belhaven” feels like the one that could bring her to the attention of a lot of new fans, who will then have this additional good news: She has 11 other novels at the ready.

The Road from Belhaven

By: Margot Livesey.

Publisher: Knopf, 259 pages, $28.