Second paragraph of third chapter:

Many weeks later, after endless fuss and expensive phone calls, they drove to the mortuary chapel at Dublin airport to load up the coffin and follow it down to Tullamore. The hearse went slowly for a while and then, at some secret moment, started belting along the road. It took the bends so fast, Carmel became a little fixated on the square end of the box disappearing up ahead. This chase went on for three hours, then the hearse slammed on the brakes and they were right on top of it again. People turned to stare. A man took off his hat and nodded right at her, through the glass. A woman stood at a garden wall with her children lined up in a row, and they each made the sign of the cross as the cars crawled past. In the centre of Tullamore, shopkeepers stood in front of half-shuttered windows, pedestrians blessed themselves and, when she looked behind, Carmel saw these people step down off the kerb to follow the cortège, like zombies. That is what she said later to Aedemar Grant, it was Night of the Living Dead Culchie. These people, in their anoraks and tweed caps, were the residents of a place that Phil McDaragh had scorned in verse – excoriated – a town he refused to visit after his mother died. And still the local people came, as the priest later intoned, to welcome their poet home.

A really great novel, with the main characters Nell and her mother Carmel; and frequent appearances from Phil, Carmel’s long-dead father, a well-known poet who was horrible to his family, but who still dominates their lives long after his death. There’s a lot of intricate exploration of family, played out against the background of Ireland in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It seems to be my first Anne Enright novel (also her most recent), but it won’t be my last. You can get The Wren, The Wren here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2023 which is not by Ben Aaronovitch. Next on that pile is The Women Could Fly, by Megan Giddings.