[6] Livesey was raised on the grounds of what was then a Scottish private boys' school, Glenalmond College, approximately 50 miles north of Edinburgh.

[8] After earning a Bachelors of Arts at the University of York, where she read philosophy and English, Livesey began to spend time in Toronto where she waitressed to support herself as she pursued writing fiction.

The story of an Edinburgh book editor who enters a relationship with the father of a disturbed child, the novel was short listed for the W.H.

[11] Livesey has followed Homework with seven other novels to date, beginning with Criminals (1996), about a banker who finds an abandoned infant in a bus station restroom and ends up leaving the baby with his sister.

The loss brings her two unexpected companions: the spirits of a young girl and an older woman, who follow Eva through her life, influencing it, sometimes rearranging the furniture, and sometimes causing trouble.

Told from alternating points of view, the novel centers on two characters—Zeke, a twenty-something house painter with Asperger's and Verona, a radio host in her late 30s.

The two meet in the novel's opening pages, when Verona, single and seven months pregnant, shows up at the house where Zeke is working, claiming to be related to its owners who have left town.

In 2008, Livesey published The House on Fortune Street, a novel constructed of four interwoven narratives: two centered on women, Abigail, an actress who owns the titular house, and Dara, a therapist who rents the downstairs apartment, and two on men: Abigail's academic boyfriend, Sean, who is working on his dissertation about John Keats, and Dara's estranged father, Cameron, a photographer who struggles with his feelings for young girls.

Not long after she turns 18, she moves to the Orkney Islands to work as a governess and meets a wealthy man, Hugh Sinclair.

[15] Livesey followed The Flight of Gemma Hardy with Mercury (2016), a novel about a couple struggling in a strained marriage.