LoveReading Says
Threaded with poetry, Anne Enright’s The Wren, The Wren is a magnificent, character-driven meditation on motherhood and daughterhood. From the conflicted pain of separation and the need to fly the nest, to the joy of fledging and the bitter-sweet pride of seeing your offspring fly free, the journeys taken by this novel’s principle protagonists strike a profound chord.
Nell is a young content writer who aspires to write more than the poorly-paid travel articles she’s currently employed to pen, and whose grandfather Phil was an Irish poet of some reputation. Between Nell and Phil, there’s Nell’s mother Carmel, a woman who believes “having a pain means you are self-obsessed, because being self-obsessed comes first and having a pain comes second.” In addition, as Nell notes, “You can’t tell Carmel you have a problem or she’ll go out and beat someone up for you.”
After enduring a toxic relationship that led to her finding “it hard to tell the difference between sex and getting hurt in other ways”, Nell travels the world and writes travel articles, all the while observing birds.
Meanwhile, a second narrative slips to Carmel’s youth, from being Phil’s “birdy” as a child, to when she fell pregnant with Nell. A heart-stopping line describing Carmel’s bond with Nell as a baby cuts to the core of this remarkable novel: “They looked at each other, and all of time was there. The baby knew how vast her mother’s loneliness had been.”
At the same time, the women’s narratives are interspersed with poems, and Phil’s story. Then, when Nell returns from her travels, there’s a beautiful, moving moment when Carmel overhears Nell talking to her new boyfriend and realises “her daughter had come back to her true self. She was grown.”
Subtle and powerful to the bone, The Wren, The Wren casts a captivating spell.
Joanne Owen
Find This Book In
Anne Enright Press Reviews
The Wren, The Wren is a magnificent novel. Anne Enright's stylistic brilliance seems to put the reader directly in touch with her characters and the rich territory of their lives -- Sally Rooney, author of NORMAL PEOPLE One of our greatest living novelists - The Times
These pages practically crackle with intelligence, compassion and wit. Phil McDaragh is so real I almost googled him. The Wren, The Wren might just be Anne Enright's best yet -- Louise Kennedy, author of Trespasses
Somehow both classic and thoroughly contemporary. Very few writers could capably achieve such a thing and I remain, as ever, in awe of Anne's talents -- Sara Baume, author of A Line Made by Walking
Tender, acutely observed, shocking at times. Enright perfectly captures the experience of a woman in her twenties, thirties, forties and fifties. Women rise throughout The Wren, The Wren, rising above abusive relationships and casual abandonment, sometimes inflicting violence on each other - but still rising into better times. Magnificent -- Priscilla Morris, author of Black Butterflies
The Wren, The Wren is simultaneously all text, and all subtext, because Anne Enright is a genius whose novels function on several planes. She takes on major Irish literary genres but amplifies them, transcends them, arriving at a new place, which we shall call love, which we shall call life, which we shall even call joy. -- Claire Kilroy, author of The Devil I Know
I could not put this book down, and felt at a loss when I got to the end. A novel of great heft and intelligence, with that mix of wit, rage and great tenderness that is Enright's hallmark. In Nell I found the best depiction of the life and mind of a contemporary young woman I've read -- Mary Costello, author of Academy Street
The unofficial rock star of literary fiction - Irish Times
One of the most significant writers of her generation... A master - Sunday Times
Alive and intricate, Enright's characters speak with a sharp-edged irony that opens into tenderness. As The Wren, The Wren unfolds, time does too. This is a humane and compulsive novel about the abandonments and reconciliations of love. Unsparing, witty, and full of hard-earned beauty -- Sean Hewitt, author of All Down Darkness Wide
Stylistically magnificent and profoundly moving, Enright blows our hearts and minds to smithereens once again with The Wren, The Wren. Full of humour, intellect, empathy and grace this multi-generational novel is singular in its vim, freshness and wit -- Helen Cullen, author of The Truth Must Dazzle
Gradually Anne Enright's style is as sharp and brilliant as Joan Didion's; the scope of her understanding is as wide as Alice Munro's; her vision of Ireland is as brave and original as Edna O'Brien's -- Colm Toibin, author of Brooklyn -
