The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

Description

The “actually unputdownable” (Ali Smith) fourth novel from the award-winning author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait: the shocking, breathtaking story of a woman’s life stolen, and reclaimed.

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?A WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER

A WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

“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

“[The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox] has the dream-like intensity of imagination and the gift of conveying pain, fear and sometimes rapture for which 0’Farrell is known. . . . The story never flags. . . . Beneath the cool Edwardian detail of this elegantly written book lie the horrors of a Gothic novel.” ―The Guardian

“Poignant and spirited.” —Chicago Tribune

“Mesmerisingly good.” ―Daily Mail

“Haunting. O’Farrell is a feminist avenging angel who wields the modern Gothic like a gleaming sword.” —The Boston Globe

“O’Farrell’s story-telling skills ensure that this novel is compulsively readable, and delivers strong emotional punch.” ―Telegraph

“O’Farrell is a very visual writer, creating dead-on images. . . . This talent serves her well at the novel’s startling and darkly rewarding finale. Suffice it to say, sometimes revenge is much more therapeutic than forgiveness.” —The New York Times Book Review

“O’Farrell displays a gift for storytelling that makes her novels almost ridiculously pleasurable to read. . . . Shocking, heartbreaking and fascinating.” —The Times

“Think Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, Charlotte Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper” or Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. . . . It’s a breathtaking, heartbreaking creation.” —Washington Post Book World

“[O’Farrell’s] talent serves her well at the novel’s startling and darkly rewarding finale.” —The New York Times

“This slow-building, impressionistic work amply rewards . . . with a moving human drama.” —Kirkus Reviews

“A gripping read with superbly crafted scenes that will blaze in the reader’s memory long after the novel is returned to the shelf.” —Booklist
MAGGIE O’FARRELL was born in Northern Ireland in 1972. Her novels include Hamnet (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Women’s Prize for Fiction), The Marriage Portrait, After You’d Gone, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Hand That First Held Mine (winner of the Costa Novel Award), and Instructions for a Heatwave. She has also written a memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death. She lives in Edinburgh.US

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