Livesey wanted to create a fictional Eva for whom the supernatural was just as commonplace. Set in Scotland, Eva Moves the Furniture tells the life story of Eva McEwen, who loses her mother at birth but gains two companions only she can see—a woman who "shone as if she had been dipped in silver" and a little girl with braids and freckles. As Eva grows up and leaves home to study nursing during the Second World War, these companions play a mysterious role in her life—sometimes helpful, sometimes menacing.

The fourth novel Livesey has published, Eva is the second she began. Her other novels—Homework, Criminals, and The Missing World—were written while she continued to work on Eva, which Livesey sometimes felt she might never successfully complete. "I had this feeling of just running into a wall," she says. "I needed to write three other novels to educate myself as to how to write this one."

Though some reviews refer to the novel as a ghost story, Livesey wanted to avoid stereotypical notions of the spirit world. "I make various efforts to fight off the word ghost. At the beginning of chapter 2, I have Eva actually think how the companions don't seem like ghosts," Livesey says. "I was aware when I was struggling to write this that there just weren't very many models in white bourgeois western fiction for stories dealing with other realities. What we do have is a scary, Stephen King, gothic, Anne Rice sort of thing."

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The Sewanee Writers' Series is pleased to announce the March 2004 release of its twelfth book, Greg Williams's Boomtown. Boomtown is the sharp hip tale of New York City dot-commers after the Y2K panic has passed. Internet start-ups are thriving, the stock market is climbing, and the dawn of the new century is just a little too bright for its own good. In this, his second novel, Williams cuts to the core of the optimistic post-millennial psyche by following the lives of Jonathan Scarver, CEO of Allminder.com; Steven Bluestein, a systems analyst bent on revenge against the company; Brad Smith, Allminder's hard-drinking publicity director; and Nicole, a struggling actress hoping for a life that's better than the one she has.

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