"[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."
"Gritty, sad, sly, riotous…[Enright’s] gem-packed language fizzes like a sidewalk firecracker."
"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
"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."
"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!"
"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."
"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."
"Achingly beautiful."
"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."
"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."
★ 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.)
"Gritty, sad, sly, riotous…[Enright’s] gem-packed language fizzes like a sidewalk firecracker."
Margaret Atwood via Twitter
"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."
"[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."
"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. "
"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."
"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."
"Achingly beautiful."
BookPage (starred review)
"A whirlwind of a novel."
"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."
"One of the best novelists of her generation . . . I have no hesitation whatsoever in recommending this book. "
"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."
"Enriched by searing if beautiful poetry, Enright’s beseeching novel thrums with desire, heartache, and connection."
Booklist (starred review)
"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."
"An unforgettable read."
★ 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
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.