I’ve read only two of Maggie O’Farrell’s ten novels, but, based on just those two I’m convinced she’s a major figure in modern fiction. I’ve already talked about her 2020 novel Hamnet, which won all kinds of prizes and was made into a superb movie in 2025. O’Farrell wrote the screenplay along with director Chloé Zhao, and Zhao nabbed a Best Director nomination and the film a Best Movie nomination. In a stunning performance, Jessie Buckley won the Best Actress Oscar; the last fifteen minutes alone would make her deserving of this award, but, please, see the whole thing. This is one of those movies as good as—but different from—the book on which it’s based, and if you haven’t seen it you are missing one of the best films of the decade. I’m glad I read the book and watched the film, but if you can deal with only one, see the movie.
It was on the basis of the Hamnet novel that my two-person book club essayed another O’Farrell book,The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, published in 2006. Click below to go to the publisher’s page:
It’s a novel about family—albeit a convoluted and dysfunctional one—and is also a bit of a mystery story, in that three related women’s voices are speaking during two different times: in India and Edinburgh in the 1930s and at the present time in Edinburgh. The mystery consists in the reader and the protagonist figuring out what happened to these women, as each had a checkered background. The novel involves are two Scottish sisters, Esme (Euphemia) and Kitty, born in India but who moved to Scotland when their baby brother died. Solving what happened next falls to their descendant Iris, living now, who has her own convoluted life.
To avoid big-time spoilers, I’ll just note that for reasons that will be revealed, Esme was confined in a mental hospital for sixty years, all the while being perfectly sane. During this time her sister Kitty raised a family, but the nature of that family involves a spoiler.
By the present time, while Esme is still confined in a “facility,” Kitty has developed Alzheimer’s and her words appear as a series of incomplete but comprehensible thoughts, thoughts that are unknown to Iris, who has decided to remove Eseme from her asylum and let her live in her home. Iris becomes obsessed with figuring out the family history despite Esme’s laconic nature and Kitty’s Alzheimer’s.
Bit by bit the pieces of the puzzle fall into place as you read, as the book comes to a bumpy and unexpected ending. That’s all I’ll say except that, as in Hamnet, O’Farrell has an eye for detail and is a superb writer.
It’s a short book (243 pp. in my edition), and I should have heard of it but hadn’t. I’m calling it to your attention because it seems relatively unknown despite its excellence. And of course I’m going to look into O’Farrell’s other books, the first of which, After You’d Gone, also received much acclaim.
And when I call books to your notice I hope you’ll let us know what you’ve read lately, especially the good stuff.