The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

by Maggie O'Farrell

It is always the meaningless tasks that endure: the washing, the cooking, the clearing, the cleaning. Never anything majestic or significant, just the tiny rituals that hold together the seams of human life.

There is a zoetrope inside her head and she doesn’t like to be caught out when it stops.

We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.