The Wren, the Wren: A Novel

by Anne Enright

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Telling the story of three generations of women, this massive character portrait of mothers and daughters is as expansive in scope as it is flawlessly written. It’s the story of inheretance in many forms, and it is a joy to read.

An NPR 2023 "Books We Love" Pick • One of The New Yorker's Best Books of the Year • One of the Washington Post's Best Books of the Year • One of Time's Best Books of 2023 • One of Harper’s Bazaar 45 Best New Books of 2023 • One of New Statesman's Best Books of 2023 • A Publishers Weekly Top 10 Books of 2023 • A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year

An incandescent novel from one of our greatest living novelists (The Times) about the inheritance of trauma, wonder, and love across three generations of women.

Nell McDaragh never knew her grandfather, the celebrated Irish poet Phil McDaragh. But his love poems seem to speak directly to her. Restless and wryly self-assured, at twenty-two Nell leaves her mother Carmel’s orderly home to find her own voice as a writer (mostly online, ghost-blogging for an influencer) and to live a poetical life. As she chases obsessive love, damage, and transcendence, in Dublin and beyond, her grandfather’s poetry seems to guide her home.

Nell’s mother, Carmel McDaragh, knows the magic of her Daddo’s poetry too well—the kind of magic that makes women in their nighties slip outside for a kiss and then elope, as her mother Terry had done. In his poems to Carmel, Phil envisions his daughter as a bright-eyed wren ascending in escape from his hand. But it is Phil who departs, abandoning his wife and two young daughters. Carmel struggles to reconcile “the poet” with the father whose desertion scars her life, along with that of her fiercely dutiful sister and their gentle, cancer-ridden mother. To distance herself from this betrayal, Carmel turns inward, raising Nell, her daughter, and one trusted love, alone.

The Wren, the Wren brings to life three generations of McDaragh women who must contend with inheritances—of poetic wonder and of abandonment by a man who is lauded in public and carelessly selfish at home. Their other, stronger inheritance is a sustaining love that is “more than a strand of DNA, but a rope thrown from the past, a fat twisted rope, full of blood.” In sharp prose studded with crystalline poetry, Anne Enright masterfully braids a family story of longing, betrayal, and hope.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324005681
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	09/19/2023
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	9,593
Product dimensions:	8.20(w) x 5.80(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Anne Enright is author of seven novels, most recently Actress. She has been awarded the Man Booker Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Irish Book Awards. She lives in Dublin.

Editorial Reviews

★ 07/17/2023

The whip-smart latest from Booker winner Enright (The Gathering) explores the complex legacy of a revered Irish poet. It begins in contemporary Dublin with late poet Phil McDaragh’s granddaughter Nell, a recent university graduate who falls for and remains attached to a man despite suspecting he’s being unfaithful and feeling underwhelmed by the sex (“not even bad in a good way”). Enright contrasts Nell’s defiant and free-spirited narration with that of Carmel, Nell’s caring and practical mother, who ponders her daughter’s future and the pain of Phil’s abandonment of her mother, Terry, when she was battling breast cancer. Phil’s legacy is present within the novel in two forms: his poems, resplendent with images of birds and bucolic lyricism, which Enright presents in their entirety; and his troubling personal life, both as an absentee father and a toxic partner to various women (a former lover and fellow poet’s relationship with him is characterized on a Wikipedia page as “abusive”). Enright imbues a sense of great importance to domestic incidents, such as in a flashback to Nell as a child, when Carmel strikes her after she acts out by breaking a light fixture, but the tone is far from despondent; the prose fizzes with wit and bite. Enright’s discomfiting and glimmering narrative leans toward a poetic sense of hope. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"Gritty, sad, sly, riotous…[Enright’s] gem-packed language fizzes like a sidewalk firecracker."

Margaret Atwood via Twitter

"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

"A whirlwind of a novel."

Irish Independent

"Art as an illusion, love as a trap, the stranglehold of family ties: these are themes that Enright has already made her own. They are not just reprised here but honed to an essential honesty. Line for line, no one is more skilled than Enright at unfolding an unsettling scene. The Wren, The Wren is ruthless, raw stuff."

The Guardian

"One of the best novelists of her generation . . . I have no hesitation whatsoever in recommending this book. "

RTE Radio 1

"A book of musical tenderness and devastating precision, The Wren, The Wren makes its own weather — whilst reading, your heart will work to Enright's beat."

Kiran Millwood Hargrave

"An unforgettable read."

Sunday Independent

"An unstinting celebration of beauty. One of Ms. Enright’s remarkable feats is to write believably across three generations, capturing epochal differences but also a buried, or even repressed, continuity."

Wall Street Journal

"[Enright's] poems have a language of their own that transcends time. Like the novel itself, they sing with grace and beauty and hard-hitting truth."

Washington Post

"This is a powerful, thoughtful book by one of the great living writers on the subject of family. Speaking about love in terms both domestic and transcendent, Enright coos through newly connected wires."

New York Times

"Achingly beautiful."

BookPage (starred review)

"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

"Enriched by searing if beautiful poetry, Enright’s beseeching novel thrums with desire, heartache, and connection."

Booklist (starred review)

★ 11/03/2023

The women of the McDaragh family have poor taste in men. In '50s Dublin, Terry falls madly for Phil, an aspiring poet. Their brief and stormy marriage ends when Terry becomes ill. Unable to handle the crisis, Phil abandons her and their young daughters, parlaying his middling fame into a faculty job and a new life in the United States. A few decades on, daughter Carmel, somewhat indifferent to men, finds herself pregnant after a one-night stand. Nevertheless, she embraces single motherhood with a fiercely protective love for her daughter, Nell. Later yet, Nell's bad choice in men is the bullying Felim, who casually uses and abuses her. Their breakup sends her into a tailspin of depression and a globe-trotting life to escape her unhappiness. VERDICT This generational story alternates between Nell and Carmel, with a little time out for Phil and his poetry. Channeling her inner Sally Rooney as twentysomething Nell, Booker Prize winner Enright (The Gathering) is as convincing as when writing about Carmel, a woman closer to her own age. A poignant novel by a writer in peak form.—Barbara Love

Library Journal

Anne Enright, Aoife Duffin, Owen Roe, and Liza Ross perform Enright's latest novel. Duffin narrates the perspective of Nell, a 20-something who is navigating the complexities of young love and desire. When she meets her new boyfriend's parents, they only want to talk about her grandfather, the famous Irish poet Phil McDaragh. Duffin beautifully captures the frustration and anxiety Nell feels toward her new romance. Enright performs the perspective of Nell's mother, Carmel, a woman who grew up in her famous father's shadow and never wanted that for Nell. Enright's narration imbues Carmel with warmth and resolve as she raises Nell as a single mother. Roe and Ross provide additional voices for the poems and letters written by Carmel and Nell. K.D.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

NOVEMBER 2023 - AudioFile

★ 2023-06-21
The exceptional, multigarlanded Irish writer returns with a three-generation, woman-centered family portrait marked by “inheritance, of both trauma and of wonder,” and melodious, poetic echoes.

After a nonfiction book (Making Babies, 2012) and a novel (Actress, 2020) exploring parenting, Enright continues to mine this fertile territory, here considering the bonds between daughter Nell and mother Carmel, each influenced by Carmel’s father, Phil McDaragh, “the finest love poet of his generation,” also remembered for “the shouting and the hitting.” His titular poem, dedicated to Carmel, is a romantic vision of the bird, “so fierce and light / I did not feel / the push / of her ascent / away from me / in a blur of love….” But it’s Phil who, bit by bit, leaves for pastures and wives new, gifting responsibility and debt to his two daughters alongside the care of their mother, who’s dying of cancer. Carmel, in turn, “would not have a man in her life,” and Nell, raised cherished but fatherless, seems ill-equipped in her dealings with the opposite sex, notably when falling for Felim, a coercive, increasingly unkind figure. She’s also searching for her own niche as a writer, leaving Ireland to wander around Europe, then the world, in pursuit of a future. The narrative switches point of view among Nell, Carmel, and Phil, and Enright adapts her gifts of musical, seamless prose, wit, capacious insight, and textured personality to each in turn. Lyrical poems of birds punctuate the text, as do snatches of cruelty and violence between men and women, sisters, men and animals, even parents and children. But the familial connections are indelible and enduring. Carmel, watching a long-ago filmed interview with Phil, remembers how devastatingly easy it was to love him. Modern young woman Nell, reaching a place of “happy separateness,” watches it too: “The connection between us is more than a strand of DNA, it is a rope thrown from the past, a fat twisted rope, full of blood.”

Tender and truthful as ever, Enright offers a beguiling journey to selfhood.

Kirkus Reviews

"What do you want from a book—simple pleasures or something to chew on? With Anne Enright’s new novel, you can have both.… Her approach [is] shards of brilliance flashing in every direction."

Times - John Self

"Art as an illusion, love as a trap, the stranglehold of family ties: these are themes that Enright has already made her own. They are not just reprised here but honed to an essential honesty. Line for line, no one is more skilled than Enright at unfolding an unsettling scene.… The Wren, The Wren is ruthless, raw stuff."

Guardian - Elizabeth Lowry

"Achingly beautiful."

starred review BookPage

"Sharp, sudden, mischievous, sublime—this is a dazzling novel; a glorious multi-generational novel of tangled relationships, secrets, bodies, sex. Nell must be one of the best young women I’ve read in recent Irish fiction."

Lucy Caldwell

"The power of Enright’s novel derives not so much from the age-old tale of men behaving badly, but from the beauty and depth of her own style. She’s so deft at rendering arresting insights into personality types or situations."

Maureen Corrigan

"Enriched by searing if beautiful poetry, Enright’s beseeching novel thrums with desire, heartache, and connection."

starred review Booklist

"Gritty, sad, sly, riotous…[Enright’s] gem-packed language fizzes like a sidewalk firecracker."

Margaret Atwood

"[Enright’s] poems have a language of their own that transcends time. Like the novel itself, they sing with grace and beauty and hard-hitting truth."

Elena Lappin

"This is a powerful, thoughtful book by one of the great living writers on the subject of family. Speaking about love in terms both domestic and transcendent, [Anne] Enright coos through newly connected wires."

Ada Calhoun

"An unstinting celebration of beauty. One of Ms. Enright’s remarkable feats is to write believably across three generations, capturing epochal differences but also a buried, or even repressed, continuity."

Wall Street Journal - Sam Sacks

"Anne Enright has long been one of my influences, way back to when I was more of a reader than a writer, and these days I regularly find myself returning to her work when I’m teaching fiction workshops. I absolutely loved The Wren, The Wren. What an utterly wonderful novel! It got into my very bones. It’s magnificent. Proof once again that Anne can do things with sentences that nobody else can!"

Danielle McLaughlin

"To call Anne Enright’s new novel a moving, nuanced glimpse at three generations of Irish life underplays its thrilling expansiveness: in the end, The Wren, The Wren is an electrifying romp through language itself—its dizzying possibilities and satisfactions—led by one the most gifted writers working in English today."

Jennifer Egan

"The Wren, The Wren shows that [Enright’s] achievements continue apace: it may be her best book yet. Not only a triumph but a joy."

Irish Culture Times