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It’s the day of the foiled terrorist attacks. Sipping tea in the corner of a hotel restaurant, Maggie O’Farrell is wondering how on earth she’s going to get her plane home to Edinburgh. Luckily, she’s distractable from her plight. Her new novel, ‘The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox’, is particularly important to her, and not just because it’s the first one she’s finished since she became a mother three years ago. She’s keen to talk about it, and relieved that it finally exists. ‘I had the idea for it back in 1990, and toyed with making it my first book,’ she says, ‘but I couldn’t find a way to make it work. I think I was too young, actually.’

‘The Vanishing Act…’ is the dark, rage-inducing tale of a woman whose life is stolen from her by her own family. Esme is the youngest of two daughters born into a prim, upper-middle-class Scottish family living in India at the tail end of Empire. Esme is surly and awkward. She embarrasses her parents and sister in social situations. She shouts and throws tantrums. What is to be done with her?

Fans of previous O’Farrell novels like ‘After You’d Gone’ and ‘The Distance Between Us’ will recognise Esme immediately. She’s a classic O’Farrell heroine: a dreamer who experiences the world sensorily and has little awareness of, or patience with, societal codes. ‘I’ve always been fascinated by what has happened to the same kinds of women at different times in history,’ says O’Farrell, who’s 34, ‘thanking my lucky stars that I was born when I was, as I don’t have much doubt that I’d have ended up like Esme.’

This is a harsh judgement; for how Esme ends up is committed – signed into an asylum by her father. There she stays for over 50 years, until the place is closed down and she becomes the responsibility of her baffled great-niece, Iris, who has never heard of her, and whose own complicated story of forbidden passion runs parallel to Esme’s before merging with it.

The novel’s premise initially beggars belief, but Esme’s story is based on a genuine case. ‘I did a lot of research because I was aware I was taking on a huge subject. The circumstances of Esme’s admission, which Iris discovers when’s she going through the old files, are completely authentic. Committing women to asylums was a convenient way to dispose of a difficult wife or a disobedient daughter, and it was done with terrifying regularity.

‘Then in the late 1980s, after the Thatcher government passed its Care In The Community legislation [which resulted in over 20,000 long-term residents of mental hospitals being summarily discharged], the psychiatric system was in chaos and lots of people slipped through the net. My aunt’s a social worker and, although the book is set now, she tells me that what happened to Esme couldn’t happen today, thank God.

’The ‘domestic gothic’ fascination with illness and family secrets links ‘The Vanishing Act…’ to O’Farrell’s other novels, but formally it’s quite different. Though not as short as one of its key influences, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s chilling nineteenth-century chronicle of post-natal depression ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, it’s rigorously compacted, cutting between time-frames and points of view with a suggestive dexterity that recalls the films of Nicolas Roeg.

‘Some of my books are probably too long,’ O’Farrell concedes. ‘Having a baby makes you dispense with bullshit. If you’ve got all day, you can be expansive and go off down alleyways, but I couldn’t do that any more. So many people, when you’re pregnant and a writer, gleefully say things to you like “Ah, every baby costs you a book” and “The pram in the hall is the enemy of art” – and I just think that’s crap. On the contrary, having a baby really makes you concentrate and focus. It’s amazing what you can do in four hours a day when you put your mind to it.’

Still, O’Farrell found it hard to click back into the routine. ‘I took six months off because I thought: That’s right, isn’t it? That’s what should happen. And when I started writing again I had the closest thing to writers’ block I’ve ever had.’ A family holiday to India helped, as well as inspiring the India-set chapters. ‘I had a kind of epiphany on the beach. The scene where Esme is turned over by a wave – I transposed it to Scotland in the end, but that happened to me in India. I got a bang on the head and, like Esme, saw my double sitting on the beach looking over at me.

‘I stumbled out of the sea with blood pouring from my head shouting, “I know how to do it! I know how to do it!” My husband Will was asking, “Are you okay? Do you want to sit down?” But I just stood there going, “I’m fine! I can see it all!”