Anne Enright

Anne Enright won the Booker Prize and the Irish Fiction Award for her novel The Gathering, which became a long time national bestseller in Canada. Her eighth, most recent novel, The Wren, The Wren, was the winner of the 2024 Writers’ Prize in Fiction and was shortlisted for the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction. She has published two books of stories, collected as Yesterday’s Weather, and the internationally acclaimed The Forgotten Waltz, awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Enright lives in Dublin.

The Wren, The Wren 

“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. 

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Owl’s Nest Books | Calgary Public Library | Audio

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• A Larger-Than-Life Poet and the Women in His Shadow. –The New York Times Book Review
• A ferocious send-up of a self-satisfied Irish poet and a brilliantly honest portrait of the women he leaves behind. –The Guardian
• Flash Fiction: Lucy’s Boyfriend by Anne Enright –The New Yorker
• ‘It is nice to be adored, until it isn’t’: Anne Enright on the problem with unrequited love. –The Guardian
• Descendants of a famous poet wrestle with his legacy in The Wren, The Wren. –NPR