The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

Edinburgh, the 1930s and the present day. Iris Lockhart is told that a psychiatric institution about to close has housed an elderly woman named Esme Lennox for more than sixty years. Esme is apparently Iris’s great-aunt, although Iris has never heard of her and her grandmother Kitty, now living with dementia, always claimed to be an only child. Iris brings Esme into her home and begins piecing together a family history that has been deliberately suppressed.

Fragments of Esme’s childhood in British India and adolescence in Edinburgh reveal a girl whose independence, curiosity and refusal to conform were treated as signs of instability. Moving among the memories of Esme, Kitty and Iris, the novel examines how family reputation, gender expectations and medical authority could combine to erase a woman from public and private life. The return of the forgotten sister forces the surviving family to confront the cost of decades of silence.