A 2012 World Book Night selection.

An impassioned, intense, haunting family drama - a stunning imagining of a life stolen, and reclaimed

Comparison: Helen Dunmore, Hanif Kureishi, Margaret Atwood
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Synopsis

A 2012 World Book Night selection.

Esme was a woman edited out of her family's history, and when, sixty years later, she is released from care, a young woman, Iris, discovers the great aunt she never knew she had. The mystery that unfolds is the heartbreaking tale of two sisters in colonial India and 1930s Edinburgh - of the loneliness that binds them together and the rivalries that drive them apart, and lead one of them to a shocking betrayal - but above all it is the story of Esme, a fiercely intelligent, unconventional young woman, and of the terrible price she is made to pay for her family's unhappiness ...

Reviews

'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

About the Author

Maggie O'Farrell is the author of five novels: After You'd Gone, My Lover's Lover, The Distance Between Us, which won a Somerset Maugham Award, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox and The Hand That First Held Mine which won the Costa Novel Award 2010. Born in Northern Ireland, Maggie grew up in Wales and Scotland. She lives in London with her husband and two children. More books by this author Author 'Like for Like' recommendation