EVA MOVES THE FURNITURE (2001)

She sees dead people. Lonely Eva is 6 years old, living with her aunt and widowed father in Troon, Scotland, when the two ghosts who will visit her throughout her life first appear. The ''companions,'' relentless meddlers, wrest from Eva her sense of control. Desperate to escape their reach, she flees to Glasgow to study nursing and tend to wounded World War II soldiers, men racked by their own personal demons. All this sounds rather menacing, but Livesey's prose, gentle and restrained, turns the novel into a wistful fairy tale. She offers an acute understanding of the connection between death and its companion, helplessness. Eva, a motherless daughter submerged in the ''underworld of mourning,'' is haunted not by ghosts but by grief.