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The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox
- Narrated by: Daniela Nardini
- Length: 6 hrs and 52 mins
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In the late nineteenth century, Charlotte Bell is growing up at Fayne, a vast and lonely estate straddling the border between England and Scotland, where she has been kept from the world by her adoring father, Lord Henry Bell, owing to a mysterious condition. Charlotte, strong and insatiably curious, revels in the moorlands, and has learned the treacherous and healing ways of the bog. When Charlotte’s appetite for learning threatens to exceed the bounds of the estate, her father breaks with tradition and hires a tutor to teach his daughter “as you would my son, had I one.”
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Publisher's Summary
From the Costa Award winning, best-selling author of This Must Be the Place and I Am, I Am, I Am, comes an intense, breathtakingly accomplished 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?
What the critics say
"O'Farrell's imaginative territory is one you return to with delight." (The Times)
"Unputdownable." (Ali Smith)
"In one touching scene Esme, sitting in the car with Iris, attempting to process her sudden emergence into the world, pretends to fall asleep because 'she needs to think'. Iris reaches over and turns off the radio; this is 'the single nicest act that Esme has witnessed in a long time. It almost makes her cry'." (The Times)
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What listeners say about The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox
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Overall

- Ann
- 2009-10-19
I didn't like it
When this book ended I thought there was some kind of mistake, so I listened to the last part again....how unsatisfactory. It's like the author just ran out of ideas and quit! I was waiting for it to get started.
1 person found this helpful