This is the fourth novel by Maggie O’Farrell: she won a Betty Trask award for her first, After You’d Gone, and the 2005 Somerset Maugham award for her third, The Distance Between Us. And yet overall her writing has attracted surprisingly little notice: her website lists only two events for 2008, in Wimbledon and Howarth, and she is rarely to be found on the literary festival circuit. I therefore leapt at the chance to hear her at the Keswick Words in the Water festival last year, just after Esme Lennox was published.

The passage Maggie chose to read at that event took us straight into the mental asylum where Esme had been incarcerated for sixty years, for no worse a charge than having been a spirited child in the 1930s; the scene describes the tension and anticipation of the young Iris going to meet and collect Esme, as a result of the ‘care in the community’ initiative for clearing out mental institutions, in this case in Edinburgh.

Two years on from that reading, the theme of asylums has just been revisited in Sebastian Barry’s Costa-winning The Secret Scripture. Both writers were born in Ireland (Barry 17 years earlier); both focus on an ageing woman being released from an asylum, with a gradual revelation of the identity of their progeny. It’s curious how powerful themes of this kind can resurface, though with very different historical and political contexts to the two narrations.

The theme in Esme Lennox that is more compelling than the scandal of asylums is the way in which family characteristics survive across generations. For instance, both Esme and Iris were fascinated by fabrics (not unlike Linda Grant’s obsession with the tactile associations of textiles); we are treated to a subtle replaying of Esme twirling before the mirror in an aquamarine silk négligé when Iris does the same many years later in a scarlet silk creation. Both hide under the table to watch as visitors arrived; and both actually end up living in the same house in Edinburgh.

But the point of the comparison is essentially how a characteristic that was criticised and punished by a past generation can then be admired and encouraged by a later one; so Esme had to be locked away for the embarrassing eruptions of her individuality, whereas when Iris displays the same spirit in running her dress-shop, Esme impulsively envies her with the admiring comment ‘How marvellous!’.

These observations will already have given away too much to those who have not yet read the book; but Maggie O’Farrell reveals the stepping-stones of her plot with delicate skill – by contrast with Barry’s more substantial alternating chapters. The loss of Esme’s younger brother foreshadows the loss of her own child, in a way that leaves the reader questioning which loss is being alluded to; but then crucial clues like the date of Esme giving birth hang in the reader’s consciousness, as we realise that both Esme and Iris are gradually uncovering the reality of their relationship.

The supporting characters behind this focal pair are also brilliant: I believed totally in Alex and Fran, and Luke and Gina, who signified for Iris the freedom we have today to indulge in messy and inconclusive relationships; and then there is Kitty, so crucial to the plot, who comes more to the fore on a second or third reading of the book – which you have to do, to relish the intricacy of the trail of clues.

The book ends hauntingly with a close-up on the damask fabric and gold piping of a certain foam cushion; and what Esme finally does with this plump cushion, which gives us a more satisfying and retributional ending than Barry attempts.

So where will Maggie O’Farrell go next? Her themes have all been quite disparate, but united by the deft, ‘tight’ writing she so admires in Virginia Woolf. Let’s hope we see more of her in future.

Brenda Stones last reviewed Hanif Kureshi’s Something To Tell You.