The Wren, The Wren
A Novel
Checking Availibility...Description
Winner of the 2024 Writers' Prize in Fiction o Shortlisted for the 2024 Women's Prize for Fiction o Named a Best Book of the Summer by The Guardian and The Times o Named one of Publishers Weekly's Top 10 Books of 2023, one of the Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Fiction, and a Best Book of the Year by Time, The New Yorker, Kirkus Reviews, The Guardian, Library Journal, Harper's Bazaar, The Conversation, and Kobo Canada
From Booker-prize winning author Anne Enright, an astonishing novel about the love between mother and daughter--sometimes fierce, often painful, but always transcendent.
"Carmel had been alone all her life. She had been alone since she was twelve years old. The baby knew all this. They looked at each other; one life into another life, and the baby knew exactly how alone her mother had been."
Nell--funny, brave and so much loved--is a young woman with adventure on her mind. As she sets out into the world, she finds her family history hard to escape. For her mother, Carmel, Nell's leaving home opens a space in her heart, where the turmoil of a lifetime begins to churn. And across the generations falls the long shadow of Carmel's famous father, an Irish poet of beautiful words and brutal actions.
This is a meditation on love: spiritual, romantic, darkly sexual or genetic. A generational saga that traces the inheritance not just of trauma but also of wonder, it is a testament to the glorious resilience of women in the face of promises false and true. Above all, it is an exploration of the love between mother and daughter - sometimes fierce, often painful, but always transcendent.
About this Author
ANNE ENRIGHT was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has published three collections of stories, collected as Yesterday's Weather, one book of non-fiction, Making Babies, and six novels, including The Gathering, which was the Irish Novel of the Year, and won the Irish Fiction Award and the 2007 Man Booker Prize, The Forgotten Waltz, which was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and The Green Road, shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and the International Dublin Literary Award and won the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. From 2015 to 2018 she was the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction. Actress was published in March 2020 and was longlisted for the Women's Prize.
Reviews
Winner of the 2024 Writers' Prize in Fiction o Shortlisted for the 2024 Women's Prize for Fiction o Named a Best Book of the Summer by The Guardian and The Times o Named one of Publishers Weekly's Top 10 Books of 2023, one of the Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Fiction, and a Best Book of the Year by Time, The New Yorker, Kirkus Reviews, The Guardian, Library Journal, Harper's Bazaar, The Conversation, and Kobo Canada
"Anne Enright's exquisitely crafted eighth novel, an intergenerational trauma story that is often very funny, infuses housework with as much poetry as big-ticket items like grief and love. . . . This is a powerful, thoughtful book by one of the great living writers."
--New York Times
"Gritty, sad, sly, riotous--Anne Enright's The Wren, The Wren takes the piss out of much, including Irish poets, mother+father+sister-hoods, bad and good sex and more, in gem-packed language that fizzes like a sidewalk firecracker. Must-read!"
--Margaret Atwood via Twitter
"[Enright's] approach--shards of brilliance flashing in every direction--means that we don't get a plotlike flow, but if you believe a book is a conversation between reader and writer, where you get out what you put in, then that's a feature, not a bug."
--The Times
"Masterful... The Wren, The Wren is the finest novel I have read in a long time."
--Daily Telegraph
"[A] spellbinding new novel....We can feel how language, when it is sufficiently well arrayed, can cross the spaces between the page and the heart and, as Enright's always does, hit home."
--The Guardian
"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
"Anne Enright has long been one of my influences, way back to when I was more 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
"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 Beautiful World, Where Are You and Normal People
"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, author of The Candy House
"These pages practically crackle with intelligence, compassion and wit. ...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...."
--Sara Baume, author of A Line Made by Walking
"Enright perfectly captures the experience of a woman in her twenties, thirties, forties and fifties.... Magnificent."
--Priscilla Morris, author of Black Butterflies
"I could not put this book down, and felt at a loss when I got to the end...."
--Mary Costello, author of Academy Street
"The Wren, The Wren is simultaneously all text, and all subtext, because Anne Enright is a genius whose novels function on several planes."
--Claire Kilroy, author of The Devil I Know
"Sharp, sudden, mischievous, sublime--this is a dazzling novel."
--Lucy Caldwell, All the Beggars Riding
"Enright blows our hearts and minds to smithereens once again with The Wren, The Wren."
--Helen Cullen, author of The Truth Must Dazzle Gradually
"Enriched by searing if beautiful poetry, Enright's beseeching novel thrums with desire, heartache, and connection."
--Booklist (starred review)
"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. 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. Tender and truthful as ever, Enright offers a beguiling journey to selfhood."
--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"The whip-smart latest from Booker winner Enright...fizzes with wit and bite. Enright's discomfiting and glimmering narrative leans toward a poetic sense of hope."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
If the product is in stock at the store nearest you, we suggest you call ahead to have it set aside for you, or you may place an order online and choose in-store pickup.
