Amazingly, I am always catching the impressive Margot Livesey’s (Banishing Verona) novels on the run. Or as excerpts in The New Yorker. Or something like that. I mention this by way of pointing out the powerful magnetic pull of Livesey’s prose. Her new opus is no different—immediately shackling me to its steady forward progress even as I was engrossed in two other novels. Two couples, neighbors in the house of the title, undergo an unhinging of their relationships and the play of fortune, good and bad, in their lives. An ambitious four-part textual invention, the goings-on at Fortune Street are offered up with a nimble precision and verbal dexterity.