The Wren, the Wren: A Novel

An incandescent novel from one of our greatest living novelists (The Times) about the inheritance of trauma, wonder, & 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 & 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) & to live a poetical life. As she chases obsessive love, damage, & transcendence, in Dublin & 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 & 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 & 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 & their gentle, cancer-ridden mother. To distance herself from this betrayal, Carmel turns inward, raising Nell, her daughter, & one trusted love, alone. 

The Wren, the Wren brings to life three generations of McDaragh women who must contend with inheritances—of poetic wonder & of abandonment by a man who is lauded in public & 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, & hope.