Anne Enright

Anne Enright on The Wren, The Wren

Award-winning author Anne Enright is joining us in St Andrews to celebrate her newest novel, The Wren, The Wren.

Carmel had been alone all her life. The baby knew this. They looked at each other, and all of time was there. The baby knew how vast her mother's loneliness 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 multigenerational novel 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.

Anne Enright is an Irish author, who has written two collections of stories, published together as Yesterday's Weather, one book of non-fiction, Making Babies, and seven novels, including the award-winning The Gathering, The Forgotten Waltz, and The Green Road. In 2015 she was appointed as the first Laureate for Irish Fiction, and in 2022 she received the Irish Book Awards Lifetime Achievement Award. She lives and works in Dublin.