A summer on a tidal island in the west of Ireland. A botanist returns to a house she inherited from a grandmother she barely knew. The garden has been kept by someone, and she does not know who.
A debut so carefully observed it reads like a memoir of a place that doesn't exist. Wren writes about weather and grief with the same unhurried attention.Aoife Devereux — The Dublin Review
The best first novel I have read this year. The garden in this book is doing work no other novel has asked a garden to do.Hadley Forsythe-Brown — author of A Smaller Map
Tender, severe, beautifully unfussy. Wren has the patience of a much older writer.The Times Literary Supplement
I read it on a long train and missed two stops. I do not think anyone is writing about inheritance with this much restraint right now.Niamh Larkin-Hale — author of The Wakes
The boat was small enough that the man rowing it apologised for the size of it before I stepped in, and then again when we were halfway across. The crossing took twenty minutes. There is a causeway, he said, but it is under at this hour, and I would not advise the wait. He had known my grandmother. He did not say so directly. He said only that he had brought her across many times, and that she did not like to be helped onto the jetty, and that he had learned not to offer.
The house faced the wrong direction. That is the first thing I want to write down. It faced inland, away from the sea, and from the jetty I could see only its back — a low slate roof, a chimney, two windows that did not look at me. The glasshouse stood to one side of it, set down into the slope of the garden so that its ridge was level with the kitchen sill. It was not in disrepair. That was the second thing.
The key was in the door. The fire had been laid but not lit. There was a small jar of cut flowers on the table — three stems of meadowsweet, which is not a flower one brings indoors, which is a flower one finds on a walk and sets down for someone — and they had been cut that morning. I knew this because they had not yet begun to drop.
I stood in the kitchen for a long time without taking off my coat. The man rowing the boat had not come up the path with me. I did not blame him.
— continues, p. 14
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Silas Wren was born in 1989 in Limerick and raised in west Clare. He trained as a botanist at Trinity College Dublin, worked for seven years for the National Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin, and began writing fiction in 2019 while convalescing from a long illness.
His short stories have appeared in The Stinging Fly, Granta, and The New England Review. The Glasshouse at Innisfree is his first novel; he is at work on a second, which is set in the same family, fifty years earlier, and which is going slowly.
He lives in a small house outside the village of Doolin, in west Clare, with a lurcher named Una. For correspondence: hello@silaswren.ie. He does not use social media. Please do not look for him there.
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