The Wren, The Wren is a story of three parts, three people: Nell, a young woman in search of adventure, her mother Carmel, and Carmel’s father Phil, the famous poet. Moving back and forth in time, between characters, between first person narrative and third, this multi-generational novel explores love, sex, the complexities and messiness of family, motherhood, sisterhood and mother-daughter relationships, women who walk their own path and defy convention, questions of whether we are born from love, how we navigate the inheritance of trauma, oppressive shadows and lingering absences.

Opening with Nell’s voice, first impressions are of a novel that’s more experimental in style – the narrative is dynamic, playful, stream-of-consciousness at points – but with Carmel’s voice we fall back into Enright’s more familiar writing style. Phil gets just the one chapter, the one chance to voice himself, and with all perspectives reading quite differently in tone and style, this can at first seem a bit disjointed. However, when we take a step back and view the novel as a whole it does tie together, capturing the perspectives and stories of these three very different individuals, tied by blood and a line through history, each influencing the generation(s) that came after them. We also get to learn more about the characters from the others’ perspectives, exploring how people are not always how they may appear to others. Once we hear from Carmel what Nell was like as a child, and about her upbringing, Nell’s narrative and voice gains new meaning. The chapters are interspersed by short poems, which serves to reinforce this sense of the generations bound by the long reaching shadow and reverberations of poetry; the poems left behind, and the lyrical but wayward man who conjured them. 

As ever, Enright’s writing style is bold, witty, dynamic and well crafted. For me, this is the kind of book deserving of a re-read for it to all better come together in my head, and I will never have any problem re-reading Anne Enright. 

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The Wren, The Wren is published by Vintage on August 31st. 

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for my eARC. 

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Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has written two collections of stories, published together as Yesterday’s Weather, one book of non-fiction, Making Babies, and seven novels, including The Gathering, which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize, The Forgotten Waltz, which was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and The Green Road, which was the Bord Gáis Energy Novel of the Year and won the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. In 2015 she was appointed as the first Laureate for Irish Fiction, and in 2018 she received the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Contribution to Irish Literature. She is also the recipient of the 2022 Irish Book Awards Lifetime Achievement Award.