by Maggie O'Farrell
Pub. 2007 by Headline Review
Synopsis
This is the story of a woman put into an asylum for doing nothing more than trying on some of her mother's clothes and refusing to cut her hair.
Not the behaviour of an insane person but the normal things a teenager does. But Esme has been born into a repressive, pre-Second-Worl-War society and so any slight rebellion is seen as a sign of an unsound mind.
It is a brilliant, evocative, moving book. It moves back and forth from the 1930s to the present-day Edinburgh. Esme's niece, Iris, is called to the asylum to meet the great-aunt she never knew she had. At first she's reluctant to have anything to do with her but then she gets caught up in the mystery that is Esme Lennox... (from a review)