The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox - Maggie O'Farrell

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?

I find one of benefits of writers that make a name for themselves is that, because you've read a number of titles by them and know you like their style and the kind of subjects they deal with, you can pick up a book by them, not read the blurb, and have a reasonably good chance of enjoying it. The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O'Farrell was one of those books for me.

There's something great about reading a novel when you have no idea what it's about, it's sort of how it should be.

As you know by now, I'm a big fan of Richard Yates. Aside from being in love with his writing, I really like the way he approaches domestic subjects. That's such a stale way of putting it but I have the same thing with Maggie O'Farrell. She's just brilliant at getting into people's homes and writing a whole family. In this novel one of the most important characters has only a handful of pages worth of airtime but O'Farrell makes sure the reader is armed with a perfect understanding of this woman's character, her public face, her lurking motives.

This is not a ghost story, but it almost kind of is. O'Farrell's writing is wonderfully haunting. You can't help but soak up the sinister atmosphere surrounding Esme Lennox and her mysterious life. There's also humour and just the right amount of odd to make this a truly unique read.

For a relatively short read, you really get involved here; ostensibly this is a snapshot of Iris's life, but there's plenty more on offer here.

I really liked this book. It gets 7.5/10 from me.

Literary Melbourne

Melbourne's reputation as Australia's cultural hub, Sydney's quirky baby brother, precedes itself and so, really, I liked Melbourne before I even arrived. Of course the city boasts more than just galleries and graffiti, it's home to the Southern Hemisphere's largest open-air market, the Queen Victoria Markets and regularly hosts huge sporting events from the Australian Open to Formula 1 to the Ashes.

My first stop, though, was always going to be the Victoria State Library. Wow. What a beautiful building. "Not many books..." I heard my sister muttering, confused as she looked through my photos. Maybe not where I was taking the photos - I was pretty distracted by the huge octagonal atrium - but behind the walls there was plenty of reading material I can assure you, a reasonably strong collection...

It's understandable why the main hall would distract me, though. It is a five-storey, octagonal room, gleaming white with rows of old hardback books framing the balconies of each floor. Looking down you see gleaming wooden benches all splaying out from the centre in a star shape and, looking up, the sunshine brings light to this huge room through a vast glass dome. The ultimate geek session for me as I genuinely felt jealous of the students knuckling down, researching endless essays on subjects that will never help them in the 'real world' but are just so pretentiously, bullshittingly awesome to write.

Melbourne is definitely a book-loving city, with the library, yes, but also the Melbourne Writers Festival, which runs every August, and tons of independent book stores. I quite accidentally stumbled across the adorable City Basement Books on Flinders Street in Melbourne's CBD. I think it's probably impossible for me to just walk past a shop that smells of books. Even if there were no books in it. Luckily this secondhand book store, despite its recent battles with a burst pipe, had an impressive range of titles that would have felt quite at home on Charing Cross Road.

Most recently, it was perhaps The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas that really put Australia's most southern city on the literary map. There are of course numerous of writers, though, who have been writing about Melbourne. For starters, The Slap was Tsiolkas' sixth novel. Have a read of this article in the Sydney Morning Herald about a survey looking at books that locals feel best sum up Melbourne: Melbourne by the Book.

A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

Jean Paget is just twenty years old and working in Malaya when the Japanese invasion begins. When she is captured she joins a group of other European women and children whom the Japanese force to march for miles through the jungle - an experience that leads to the deaths of many. Due to her courageous spirit and ability to speak Malay, Jean takes on the role of leader of the sorry gaggle of prisoners and many end up owing their lives to her indomitable spirit. While on the march, the group run into some Australian prisoners, one of whom, Joe Harman, helps them steal some food, and is horrifically punished by the Japanese as a result. After the war, Jean tracks Joe down in Australia and together they begin to dream of surmounting the past and transforming his one-horse outback town into a thriving community like Alice Springs...

Starting in London, then on to the invasion of Malaysia by the Japanese in World War 2 before moving to Alice Springs and then the east coast of Australia - there didn't seem like a more appropriate follow-on from The Glass Palace than A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute.

My edition of the novel actually included a touching introduction from Eric Lomax, the writer of The Railway Man that I read at the end of last year. Having read Lomax's memoir, then The Glass Palace and now this, I feel I'm just starting to really grasp what it was like in South East Asia during and after the war. This is particularly interesting to me as my grandparents lived in Malaysia for decades and my mum was born out there.

If you're a woman and need to feel empowered, you have to read this book. This basically paints a world where one woman shows everyone else how it's done. She's a little annoying in places, and that probably makes me anti-feminist in some definition or other, but ultimately Jean Paget is pretty awesome. I can't imagine what it must have felt like reading this novel if you were Eric Lomax, reading the descriptions of the all too familiar insane heat, the death and disease, the starvation.

Shute's novel definitely paints a convincing scene but its ambition is of course not that of The Railway Man, or even The Glass Palace. To read, the book felt dated but in a good way, like I was reading one of my grandad's books or something - a nice alternative to the more modern reads I normally find myself with. There is a strong romantic thread in this book, which I appreciated - you definitely root for all the characters - but, for me, this is where the dated element of the book didn't quite work. It was all a little too trad for my liking, which is saying something as Jean Pagets life is far from traditional - for now, let alone then! But yeah, I guess it must have been the influence of The Glass Palace, but I surprised myself by wanting a little less romance, and a little more of the history, culture and time. For some reason it just started to feel a bit two-dimensional. I hate saying that as this is a good book, it is. And a great choice for my trip considering the route I took. I just think it's a case of a modern reader being used to a certain amount, or more a certain kind of drama that this book just didn't provide I'm afraid.

Overall, though, this gets a 5/10 - by 5, I mean 5, not 1. I have a tendency to lump any rating from 1 to 5 together as 'not very good', but I enjoyed it on an average level, so it gets a half score. It's a great insight into a particular time, not just in Asia and Australia either, but of the world and the way it got so much smaller after the Second World War, and then better technology and transport, brought so many people together.