The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox Book

From the bestselling, critically acclaimed author of HAMNET and I AM, I AM, I AM, comes an intense, breathtakingly accomplished story of a woman's life stolen, and reclaimed. 'Unputdownable' Ali SmithEdinburgh 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?

The winner of 2007's Good Housekeeping Book Awards: Best Book of the Year award, Maggie O'Farrell's impassioned and haunting family drama, The Vanishing Act Of Esme Lennox, is the story of Esme, a woman edited out of her family's history who is released from care after sixty years. A young woman, Iris, discovers the great aunt she never knew she had and then unfolds the heartbreaking tale of two sisters in colonial India and 1930s Edinburgh, the loneliness that binds them together and the rivalries that drive them apart, and how all this led to one of them making a shocking betrayal. The novel marks a significant departure for O'Farrell, in terms of both maturity and style.