Anne Enright’s bold new novel The Wren, The Wren is the work of a writer at the height of her power

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In her essay Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, published in 1924, Virginia Woolf famously proposed that the novel’s primary function is the expression of character. She presented the maxim: “it is only if the characters are real that the novel has any chance of surviving.”

But in her discussion of what constitutes “real character”, she went on to ask a strikingly contemporary question: “what is reality? And who are the judges of reality?”