The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

O'Farrell, Maggie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0755308441 ISBN 13: 9780755308446

Publisher: Tinder Press, 2013

From the Costa Award winning, bestselling author of THIS MUST BE THE PLACE and I AM, I AM, I AM, comes an intense, breathtakingly accomplished story of a woman's life stolen, and reclaimed.

'Unputdownable' Ali Smith

Edinburgh in the 1930s. The Lennox family is having trouble with its youngest daughter. Esme is outspoken, unconventional, and repeatedly embarrasses them in polite society. Something will have to be done.

Years later, a young woman named Iris Lockhart receives a letter informing her that she has a great-aunt in a psychiatric unit who is about to be released.

Iris has never heard of Esme Lennox and the one person who should know more, her grandmother Kitty, seems unable to answer Iris's questions. What could Esme have done to warrant a lifetime in an institution? And how is it possible for a person to be so completely erased from a family's history?

Review:

Actually unputdownable, written with charge and energy and a kind of compelling drive, a clarity and a gripping dramatic insidiousness reminiscent of classic Daphne du Maurier (Ali Smith)

O'Farrell's subtlety and delicate touch have never been so finely demonstrated (Independent on Sunday)

Mesmerisingly good (Daily Mail)

O'Farrell's story-telling skills ensure that this novel is compulsively readable, and delivers strong emotional punch (Telegraph)

From the Publisher:

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox is, quite simply, electric: the most breathtaking novel you will read this year. With passion and exquisite control, it reveals the story of Esme, an unhappy child in colonial India, and later a troubled young woman in 1930s Edinburgh, who tragically does not fit into that straight-laced world, and of the devastating decision her family makes when this situation becomes a crisis. It shows us how her family closes around this terrible secret – so that when, many years later, a young woman, Iris, gets a call from a psychiatric hospital saying they are about to release Esme, Iris has genuinely never heard of her – and how Iris and Esme piece together a story as heartbreaking as it is shocking.

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox sees Maggie O’Farrell mark out her own unique imaginative territory. It is a book that will delight all her legions of existing fans, with a maturity and power that will bring her to a whole new readership