A young banker responds to his sister's plea to come to Scotland to help her. On the way, in a bus station, he finds a 4 months old baby girl and almost by accident takes her with him.
Sort of lukewarm

Elegant and dark -- Margot Livesey is a writer everyone should discover -- This is my favorite of her books.
--Michael

I remember reading good reviews of this book when it came out a couple of years ago. I did not pick it up then, but did so recently at the Chapters' bargain table (where one can often find quite good novels at only $6-7), and am glad that I did so. I liked this, and read it through in one-go on this cool, cloudy Sunday. The story is slightly implausible, but Livesey brings it off: a merchant banker, taking a bus to see his sister in Scotland who is depressed over a breakup with her husband, finds a baby in a cubicle in a men's room at a bus stop, picks it up and then gets back on the bus to get his luggage off, but the bus leaves, he sits down, and the story develops from there. His sister is totally taken with the baby (the child she never had and longed for with her husband) and schemes to keep her. But the sister is sliding into madness; the child serves to stop that slide, temporarily, but when the prospect arises of having to return the child and recognize that it does have at least a mother that loves it, Mollie (the sister) begins to lose her grip on reality. One thing after another prolongs the delay in notifying the authorities and finally Ewan (the banker) returns to London and then on to Milan for a business trip, believing that his sister has taken the baby to the police. The real father of the child, a laid-off lout, who had left the baby in the bus station washroom, has witnessed the whole thing and knows where the sister lives. He develops a scheme for blackmail, all the time fending off the mother (with whom he is temporarily living with again) who is frantic with fear and concern.

The story really hinges, at the beginning, on the one moment of inattention by Ewan in how he responds upon finding the child; something totally out of character for him, and one of those "fate-fuelled" instances that sets life down a totally unforseen path, where each incident, small in and of itself, weaves into a network of lies and deceits and rationalizations that cannot be undone, but must be smashed or cut apart. The smashing is in the climax of the novel and Livesey builds to it very nicely.

No one shines or stands out in this story, but it is one of love betrayed, of secrets told, of duplicity, lust, loneliness, selfishness, greed, forgetfulness, and even banal procrastination. A good story, well-told, and well-written.