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Extracts

Extract: The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright

Anne Enright and Edna O'Brien paved the way. Image: Getty/Alicia Fernandes/Penguin

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Features

How Ireland’s women writers found their long-overdue spotlight

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Shelf Life: Anne Enright on the five books that made her

Anne Enright to receive the Irish PEN Award

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News

Anne Enright to receive the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Contribution to Irish Literature

The Forgotten Waltz

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 and the 2024 Writers' Prize for Fiction.

A powerful, moving book of secrets, longing and loss, from the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Gathering. 
 
 If it hadn't been for the child then none of this might have happened. 
 
 She saw me kissing her father. 
 
 She saw her father kissing me. 
 
 The fact that a child got mixed up in it all made us feel that it mattered, that there was no going back. 
 
 **Shortlisted for The Orange Prize for Fiction** 
 
'Absolute genius' BBC Radio 4

The Green Road

Shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2016 
Shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Novel Award 
Longlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize 
Winner of the Irish Novel of the Year 2015 
 
 
Hanna, Dan, Constance and Emmet return to the west coast of Ireland for a final family Christmas in the home their mother is about to sell. As the feast turns to near painful comedy, a last, desperate act from Rosaleen - a woman who doesn't quite know how to love her children - forces them to confront the weight of family ties and the road that brought them home. 
 
**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**

Actress

‘Written with all the ingenuity and twisty tautness of a thriller’ The Times 
 
From the Booker-winning Irish author, a brilliant and moving novel about fame, sexual power, and a daughter’s search to understand her mother’s hidden truths. 
 
 This is the story of Irish theatre legend Katherine O’Dell, as told by her daughter Norah. It tells of early stardom in Hollywood, of highs and lows on the stages of Dublin and London’s West End. Katherine’s life is a grand performance, with young Norah watching from the wings. 
 
 But this romance between mother and daughter cannot survive Katherine’s past, or the world’s damage. As Norah uncovers her mother’s secrets, she acquires a few of her own. Then, fame turns to infamy when Katherine decides to commit a bizarre crime. 
 
 Actress is about a daughter’s search for the truth: the dark secret in the bright star, and what drove Katherine finally mad . . .

The Booker Prize-winning author

The Wren, The Wren

WINNER OF THE WRITERS’ PRIZE FOR FICTION 2024 
 
TAKE FLIGHT WITH THE IRRESISTIBLE NEW NOVEL FROM THE BOOKER PRIZE WINNER 
 
‘A magnificent novel’ SALLY ROONEY 
 
Nell 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. Over them both falls the long shadow of Carmel’s famous father, an Irish poet of beautiful words and brutal actions. 
 
From our greatest chronicler of family life, The Wren, The Wren is a story of the love that can unite us, and the individual acts that threaten this vital bond. 
 
‘A triumph…treasure it’ Sunday Times 
 
‘One of the great living writers on the subject of family’ New York Times 
 
‘A must-read’ MARGARET ATWOOD (on Twitter) 
 
‘A pleasure from beginning to end’ Irish Times 
 
* Book of the Year for the Sunday Times, Observer, Guardian, TLS, Harper’s Bazaar, New Statesman, New Yorker, Time and Washington Post * 
 
Readers love The Wren, The Wren 
‘I was swept away… absolutely beautiful’ 
‘A must-read: her best novel yet’ 
‘Stunning… a five-star read’ 
‘A wonderful novel… I could not wish for more’ 
‘A novel to fall into… gorgeous’ 
‘Magnificent…moving, beautiful’ 
‘Spellbinding… you are astonished over and over’ 
‘I loved this book’

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

The Wren, The Wren may be her best book yet

Wonderful… This deceptively modest novel is the kind of book that will work on you long after you have put it down

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

Anne Enright’s The Wren, The Wren is so good they named it twice, so good I read it twice – and read two different novels, because moral positions are incorrigibly plural in Enrightville

Gritty, sad, sly, riotous... Gem-packed language that fizzes like a sidewalk firecracker. A must-read

Margaret Atwood, author of THE HANDMAID'S TALE (via Twitter)

The Wren, The Wren is Anne Enright at her lyrical, storytelling best

This is the golden age of Irish prose fiction. Of our many prodigiously talented novelist, few have the all-encompassing deftness of touch of Anne Enright

Times Literary Supplement, *Books of the Year*

One of my books of any year. It’s about womanhood, youth and that slow, painful, but joyous estrangement that emerges between mother and daughter as life runs its tumultuous course

A work of astounding ventriloquism and hard-won hope about women’s lives

Shards of brilliance flash in every direction... Damn, Enright can write

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

One of our greatest living novelists

The unofficial rock star of literary fiction

Another exquisite read from the inimitable Booker prize-winning author

An astounding book. Anne Enright is the best living writer on the family and its difficult, disquieting intimacies, pulling back the sheets on sex and love, and meditating too on the complex inheritance of what it is to be an Irish writer

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

One of the most significant writers of her generation... A master

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, author of The Girl of Ink and Stars

This is Anne Enright at her best - a glorious multi-generational novel of mothers and daughters, of tangled relationships, secrets, bodies, sex. Sharp, sudden, mischievous, sublime - this is a dazzling novel. Nell must be one of the best young women I've read in recent Irish fiction

A slow-burning commentary on ancestry, love and longing, which leaves enough unsaid to truly captivate its reader

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

Seán Hewitt, author of All Down Darkness Wide

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

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

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 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, author of The Art of Falling

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

A mature work with a wicked sense of humour

A thoughtful novel… with sublime writing and beautiful poetry

Good Housekeeping, *Summer Reads of 2024*

Nell 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&rsquo;s leaving home opens a space in her heart, where the turmoil of a lifetime begins to churn. Over them both falls the long shadow of Carmel&rsquo;s famous father, an Irish poet of beautiful words and brutal actions. 
 
From our greatest chronicler of family life, The Wren, The Wren is a story of the love that can unite us, and the individual acts that threaten this vital bond.

the Sunday Times bestselling memoir of stumbling into motherhood

Making Babies

1000 kilometres away from baby whisperer books, and one every petrified parent-to-be should read.

Fizzingly entertaining. Reading it is like having a conversation with your funniest friend. Enright has pulled off that rarest of tricks: writing brilliantly about happiness

Making Babies is an absolute joy, the perfect, intelligent antidote to poisonous books on the subject

An unadulterated delight...suffused with a sense of love and very, very funny

Gasp-making, jaw-dropping and eloquently astounding

Enright is such an original and witty writer. Her tone is utterly unsentimental and kept reducing me to tears

Anne Enright is an eloquent writer...dazzlingly funny

Making Babies is not just a good book, it's a good thing. It induces hope. It creates an appetite for life. It is also a very effective contraceptive

A hopelessly vivid maker of sentence, of the sort you can't help reading aloud to whoever happens to be nearby... Ms. Enright's commentary on gender politics and babies, like a swimming pool illuminated by underwater lights, also casts an entrancingly strange glow

Joyous!... very funny. With originality and truth, she perfectly nails the madness and simplicity of motherhood

A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
 'An unadulterated delight...suffused with a sense of love and very, very funny' Maggie O'Farrell 
 
 It's 2004 and Anne Enright, one of Ireland's most remarkable writers, has just had two babies: a girl and a boy. 
 
 Making Babies, is the intimate, engaging, and very funny record of the journey from early pregnancy to age two. Written in dispatches, typed with a sleeping baby in the room, it has the rush of good news - full of the mess, the glory, and the raw shock of it all. 
 
 An antidote to the high-minded, polemical 'How-to' baby manuals, Making Babies also bears a visceral and dreamlike witness to the first years of parenthood. Anne Enright wrote the truth of it as it happened, because, for these months and years, it is impossible for a woman to lie.

Vintage Minis

Babies

Vintage Minis bring you the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human – from birth to death and everything in between

Imagine our joy when Vintage announced that it is publishing a collection of easily digestible books from the world’s most celebrated writers on the experiences that make us human… They look good and read well. That’s win/win in our book.

Babies: our biggest mystery and our most natural consequence, our hardest test and our enduring love. Anne Enright describes the intensity, bewilderment and extravagant happiness of her experience of having babies, from the exhaustion of early pregnancy to first smiles and becoming acquainted with the long reaches of the night. Everyone, from parents to the mildly curious, can delight in Enright’s funny, eloquent and unsentimental account of having babies. 
 
Selected from the book Making Babies by Anne Enright 
 
 VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. 
 
A series of short books by the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human 
 
 Also in the Vintage Minis series: 
Fatherhood by Karl Ove Knausgaard 
Motherhood by Helen Simpson 
Drinking by John Cheever 
Sisters by Louisa May Alcott

Anne Enright

'Witty, original, inventive...utterly compelling' Daily Mail 
 
Winner of the Man Booker Prize 
 
 The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan gather in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother Liam. It wasn't the drink that killed him - although that certainly helped - it was what happened to him as a boy in his grandmother's house, in the winter of 1968. 
 
 The Gathering is a novel about love and disappointment, about thwarted lust and limitless desire, and how our fate is written in the body, not in the stars. 
 
'It is clearly the product of a remarkable intelligence, combined with a gift for observation and deduction' A.L. Kennedy, Guardian

The Gathering

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