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Booker Prize-winning Irish author Anne Enright’s “magnificent” new novel The Wren, The Wren, has been signed by Vintage.
UK and Commonwealth rights were acquired by Hannah Telfer, managing director at Vintage, from Peter Straus at RCW. Michal Shavit will publish The Wren, The Wren (Jonathan Cape, Vintage) on 7th September 2023.
The publisher describes the novel as “a contemporary meditation on daughterhood and motherhood across the arc of generations”.
Its synopsis reads: “Nell, a young woman with adventure on her mind, falls into the wrong kind of relationship. For Carmel, her mother, 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 reflection on love: spiritual, romantic, darkly sexual or familial. A 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.”
Enright is the author of two collections of stories, published together as Yesterday’s Weather (Grove Press), one book of non-fiction, Making Babies (Vintage), and seven novels, including The Gathering, which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize, The Forgotten Waltz (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 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.
Telfer said: “I was a fan of Anne Enright’s work long before I joined Vintage, so getting to work with her and the Jonathan Cape team here to help bring this magnificent novel to the world is a huge pleasure. With each book she further cements her place as one of the UK and Ireland’s most important and insightful writers, and I’m certain The Wren, The Wren will burnish her stellar reputation even more.”
Shavit commented: “This stunningly beautiful new novel from Anne Enright considers the inheritance of trauma and of wonder. At once heart-wrenching and funny, it is also a love letter to the Irish lyric form and its heritage. With unforgettable characters and a deeply humane lens on the complexity and irony of family dynamics and the power of the written word, it confirms Anne Enright as one of the greatest writers of our time.”
Enright said: “The character of Carmel came to me in the tough, grinding, utterly bereft days of the early pandemic but I did not know what to do with her until she gave birth to Nell, a child full of light and hopefulness. All Nell’s mistakes — and some of them feel catastrophic — are her own to make. Despite the darkness it describes, the book is full of faith in the coming generation’s ability to take the best of the past and leave the worst behind.”