The Wych Elm (or The Witch Elm as it is known in the US) by Tana French is a masterpiece in storytelling, characterisation and plotting. I am a massive fan of her Dublin Murder Squad series of books and have been waiting for a new book from one of my favourite writers ever since I turned the last page of The Trespasser. The Wych Elm is a standalone novel and so if you haven’t read any of her previous books and is a great entry point into her writing.

Our protagonist in this book is Toby, a white, middle class, well-educated man who is quick to say that he is lucky. Very, very lucky. You know those people who fall in manure and come out of smelling of roses? That’s him. We all know somebody like that (I certainly do). He is young, good looking, has a lovely girlfriend and reeks of privilege and entitlement and everything in Toby’s life is pretty brilliant. Until one night, after an evening out with his two best mates he is viciously attacked and left for dead and he realises that his luck may just have run out. Returning to the family home, The Ivy House, to convalesce in a warm, loving environment seems to be the perfect solution, but when a skull is found in the wych elm in the garden, a hornets nest is opened.

The attack has left him with both physical and mental scars. The once bright, cocky, fast talker and quicker is replaced with a man who finds that words fall out of his head and memories seem to be lost forever. The contrast between the two Tobys is brilliantly written with the confusion and despair that he feels leaping from the page. He doesn’t quite know who he is, returning to The Ivy House, a place where he and his cousins Susanna and Leon both spent much of their youth, should be the perfect antidote but his injuries mean that his opinion of himself is built from the observances and memories of others and it seems that Toby isn’t the kind and lovable man he thinks he is.

This is an incredible book which examines memory, privilege and family dynamics. The Ivy House with its nooks and crannies, overflowing bookcases and trinkets on all of the mantelpieces and tables is full of atmosphere. This closed, claustrophobic space is the perfect location for introspection and the ever increasing tension allows grudges and resentments to build. The Wych Elm has been compared to The Secret History by Donna Tartt (my favourite ever book) and I can see why with its small number of tight-knit characters, an unreliable narrator and the spectre of death tainting everything.

Tana French writes this stuff so well. Her characterisation and ability to layer meaning into every word she writes is mind blowing. This isn’t a book to devour in one sitting – I don’t mean that in a bad way, I love a Sunday afternoon tearing through a book in a few hours as much as the next person, but this is a book to savour. It took me a week or so to read it and I enjoyed every minute of it. It felt like sinking into a hot bath at the end of a long day with a glass of wine, the expensive bubble bath and a candle burning; luxurious and special and something to relish. If you haven’t read a Tana French before make this your first one, then you can go back and read the Dublin Murder Squad books – lucky you! This book gets all the stars from me due to its quietly unsettling and atmospheric writing that got under my skin. A masterpiece.

With thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for the book in exchange for an honest review.
I was going to stop reading about a third of the way through but kept thinking I would soon see why the reviews were so positive. I don’t think this book was my kind of book. I read it through to the end and was left thinking I had missed the point of it. So I am sure other readers will enjoy and appreciate it. It just wasn’t for me.

This was my first Tana French book and unfortunately I was rather disappointed. The story is very slow and it took me far longer to read than a 500 page book usually does. The last act was the best part of the story but by then I really wasn't that interested anymore. It's probably a case of wrong book, wrong time for me. I may revisit this author in the future but unfortunately I didn't enjoy this book and I won't be leaving a review elsewhere. Sorry.

After an attack in his home leaves Toby traumatised, and with long standing injuries, he is struggling to get his life back to normal.  He decides to spend some time back at the old family home, with his uncle, finding that this is one of the few places he feels safe.  Not long after Toby arrives a skull is discovered, tucked inside the old wych elm in the garden.  The police are called, and soon the family are in the middle of a police investigation.  Despite still having memory issues, Toby is forced to examine his past, and reconsider everything he thought he knew about himself and his family.

This book wasnt quite what i was expecting going in, but that wasn't a bad thing.  I had assumed this would be a crime drama, similar to French's Dublin murder squad series, but it was actually more of a family drama.  Even though it wasn't what I expected, I still really enjoyed the read, and thought it was written exceptionally well. If I had known it was a family drama I probably wouldn't have requested it from NetGalley, but the writing totally drew me in. 

This book is very much a character driven story rather than a plot driven story.  Don't get me wrong, there is a plot line there and it works well, but essentially it is there to explain why the characters are doing what they are doing.  The characters are really well imagined, almost enough to feel like real people, and evoked some really strong emotional responses in me.
I really didn't like Toby at the start of the book.  He seemed like an entitled snot of a bloke, always had an easy life, everything always worked out for him, and thought that those who had it tough only had themselves to blame.  He's very self absorbed, and as the book progresses we see that this has been an issue his entire life.  There were times as the book progressed that I thought he was starting to grow on me, but then he would come out with another entitled sort of a comment and I'd be back to severely disliking him again.
In all honesty, the rest of the characters are really more supporting characters, but we still get a really good picture of them.  Hugo as the lovable uncle who is like a second father figure, Leon as a tortured teen who goes on to be an unsettled adult, never staying long in one place, and Susannah as a 'supermum' type, another who had lead a very entitled life but doesn't seem to acknowledge it.
French writes this book brilliantly, and seeing Toby examine his history and realising that his memory or idea of whom he was in the past is totally different to what other people saw or thought is fascinating. 

For me, the more interesting part of this book is the theme of privilege that runs through it.  Seeing how the characters explore their past and examine this concept made for some uncomfortable reading, not least because none of them seem to recognise that despite the hardships they might have faced, they are all in a position of privilege.  It's something that I think a lot of us (myself included) are guilty of at times, and it certainly made me question myself.

I really enjoyed this.  When I find a book that isn't something I would normally read still pulls me in like this one did it's a sure fire high scorer.  I also found that I was enjoying reading despite not really liking any of the central characters, another sure sign for me that the writing is superb. The build of suspense throughout leaves you on edge, waiting for the kick, and right to the end you don't know what is real and who to trust.

As no stranger to the work of Tana French, I was delighted to get my hands on an advance copy of this book.
The protagonist is Toby, a pretty ordinary young man, happy with his life by and large, though feeling the pressure from some stupid decisions he made at work. His world is turned upside down one night when his home is broken into and he is injured severely both physically and mentally. Struggling to come to terms with the long recovery ahead, he is roped into moving in with his uncle, who is terminally ill. At a family gathering a human skull is found inside a tree trunk in the garden, and as the police investigation begins, Toby must try to put together his fractured memories while worrying about what they might actually reveal.
This book is slower paced than many, and at its heart is the question if we do not know who we really are, who can we trust to help us find out. The central relationship in the story is the bond between Toby and his cousins, Leon and Susanna but I did really love Uncle Hugo as a character. Much of the story is told from Toby's perspective, and I really liked that he was a character with many shades and moral ambiguities. At times I found myself sympathetic to his plight, but at other moments he was simply unlikable and unpleasant.
My biggest issue with the book was definitely its pacing, we spend almost half of the book with Toby before the discovery of the skull, which is the trigger for most of the more interesting plot points. I was familiar enough with the author to persevere but I fear that others may mot be as patient.
I read and reviewed an ARC courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher, all opinions are my own.

This time Tana French did not write one of her trademark detective-character driven stories. In all her other books we learned about different detectives, their often messy life and how they solved a mysterious crime. This time the police stay in the background. Here it is all about Toby. He is working in PR for an art gallery. His character is not as interesting as French’s former main protagonists. But as flawed as he is, he is also very close to life character.

Toby is a kind of golden boy. Everything comes easy to him. He is good looking, charming, his parents are not wealthy but doing OK, he has a big and loving family, a good job and a lovely girlfriend. He can talk his way out of every mess he gets himself into. He seems to be a nice guy and he thinks this of himself, obviously. But he is an ignorant snob, self-centered, shallow and too convinced of himself. This all will change one evening. He gets attacked in his home and barely survives. After his recovery he has some physical problems but mostly he has issues with his memory. This attack throws him of the track and leaves him traumatized. He is not able to work or get back to his normal live. So it comes in handy when he is asked to look after his uncle which is dying of brain cancer. He moves in with him in his house where he used to spent a lot of time when he was a kid together with his cousins. One day they discover a skeleton inside a tree. And that opens Pandora ’s Box.

The main plot is not that complicated. But Tana French is not one who writes short and sweet. You have to be into long storytelling with details and a lot of dialog to enjoy her books. But she writes so beautifully and eloquent, especially dialogs so that I really love reading pages and pages of stuff which is more for depth and development than making the story gripping and a pageturner.

The story about the crime and the hidden skeleton comes into focus very late in the book. The story is more of a character study and family drama than a crime story. Toby personality changed after the attack. He does not know himself anymore and his natural charme has vanished. And we as a reader are witnessing his mental decline in every detail.
The actual crime story is not over-exciting. The circle of characters is small but French got some twists for us so it is hard to guess what happened. For me it was more interesting to see how different they all remembered what happened during their time at school. Toby is not only an unreliable narrator because of his problems with his memory. Before the attack he went to his live without a care for other people problems. He was an ignorant and careless bastard and I wondered why everybody liked him at all. He is not the typical a**hole but he is not a very likeable person.

This book is hard to rate. I love Tana French and I enjoyed reading this book. But it is very long and full of details. Some of them an entertaining and interesting but some seem just so random. When Toby and his cousins sit together and talk which is nice to read but there is also a lot of how they smoke, where the lighter is, where the ashtray will be, what they drink, when they top of their glasses. It is a lot of minor information which is not actually necessary for the story. It creates the atmosphere, you can almost see them sitting and talking and drinking and smoking. But it also a lot of words and a lot of reading. It goes through the entire book. There is a lot of every minute and every detail describing.

As I said, I enjoyed reading this book although it is a bit long and winded. But I will read definitely French’s next book. She is simply an amazing writer.

I wanted to read this book so much that when I found out it was being published in the US before the UK, I imported a copy. So I first read it last year, and then read it again in a review version just now. It’s a rare thriller/crime story that can stand up to two reads in six months, but this one did. It is not, by the way, part of Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series, but a standalone. Though some Dublin policemen do feature.

I remembered just the right amount: I knew the general outline of the crime at the centre of the story, and I could see how carefully French seeded it – not clues exactly, I’m not sure that’s what she was doing, but phrases and sentences that made sense second time around. But there were still many surprises (including quite a large late event which I had completely forgotten) and the whole thing was a compelling page-turner all over again.
The key characters are three first cousins, two men and a woman, all the same age, who grew up together and as teenagers spent a lot of time with their Uncle Hugo in a family house in Dublin. Long happy summers, parties, nights out under the stars, experimenting with smoking and drugs and drinking and sex.





The book is narrated by Toby, and starts out 10 years after they all leave school – that was the key summer in the plot. It takes place entirely now: all the history is memory, and description, and discussion, no flashbacks as such.

The characters are so fully-realized – for a long time (if you didn’t know) you would think this was a literary novel about a young man having a crisis. Something bad happens to Toby early on, but this doesn’t seem related to the big crime plot that you know is coming – which starts a long way in. Toby is charming to others (it’s not always apparent to the reader) and entitled, and tells us he is lucky.

French does long casual social events extremely well. When the family gathers at Ivy House, the three cousins go and sit outside together, the first of several such conversations, all related at great length, throughout the book.
Susanna let out a breath precariously near to laughter or tears. ‘Last night she came to me,’ she sang softly, ‘my dead love came in…’
Oliver’s voice, eroded to veil-thinness by distance, fell on hers like an echo. My dead love came in… Out over the grass, among the Queen Anne’s lace and the leaves.
Isn’t that perfect? A perfect moment, the perfect song (She Moved Through the Fair), and your indicator that some bad times are coming.

And it’s a good third of the way through (p 165) before the real events start… but that is not at all meant to imply the book is not compulsively readable: it just shows how brilliant French is.

One weird thing is this: I have always enjoyed those books where the characters look back to a long hot summer, tangled relationships, a house that meant something, a secret and something bad – Barbara Vine’s A Fatal Inversion, Erin Kelly’s The Poison Tree, Harriet Evans’ Wildflowers – but it is something of a shocker where the long-ago summer was a time of mobile phones and cameras. Just saying. Made me feel old. I will say that I started out worrying about the smartphones and technology ten years back from what is obviously roughly now, but gave up trying to track it in the end. There may have been liberties taken, but the two strands work perfectly well.

I am intrigued (in general) by the phrase 'you do you', which has been around a while, but doesn't come up in books much (well not the ones I read) and here it is:

'picking at it after how many years, what's the point? But you do you.'
(If, like me, you are not always down with the slang, it means something like 'you are how you are', with a strong implication that how you are is not perfect. I think. Correct me if you think otherwise.)

The final verdict is that The Wych Elm is just marvellous. Tana French is surely one of the best writers around these days. There are a number of her other books on the blog.


My go-to for pics of Irish houses will always be the lovely National Library of Ireland – they have a fabulous collection of photos (of all aspects of Irish life) and they make them freely available for Creative Commons. This is a Dublin house that could stand in for Ivy House in the book, even though the library caption says it’s not a great photo (top cut off, photographed on a slight tilt).

The Toast fashion catalogue is a go-to for women looking moody in lovely quirky clothes, as seem to fit the characters here, so that is where those pictures come from. Melissa wears ‘bright flowered dresses in soft cotton’ (and, fair play, isn’t very moody considering everything going on, unlike Susanna, above.)

The tiny picture of a wych elm is from a 19thC book about trees of the British Isles.

When Toby moves back into his childhood house to look after his uncle a sinister family secret is unearthed. How much of Toby’s past does he remember and are his memories truly reliable?

I must admit, unlike a lot of reviewers I have never read a book by Tana French before so I had no expectations of the book going in. I’ll start with the positives, I really enjoyed the ending of the book – the last 15% or so was good enough to take my rating from two stars to three. The ending is such a change from the rest of the book - the pace ramps up nicely, there’s twists and turns and curve balls thrown at the reader, all the of the strands of the narrative are nicely brought together and resolved – it’s a great ending.

The rest of the book however, was a massive disappointment for me. In the nicest possible way a lot of the book is very, very dull. It is in drastic need of an edit as there is a great story under there it’s just buried by a lot of filler. About 30%-70% (sorry, I’m a kindle reader – no page numbers!) of the book could have easily been condensed or cut completely and it would have been a hard hitting and interesting murder story. I would say it could easily be 250 pages shorter without any major plot elements or important parts taken out. We didn’t need the endless details of the family Sunday lunches or the side-plot of Hugo’s family tree project which had no relevance to the story. We didn’t need the drawn out story of Toby’s rehabilitation before the actual plot itself kicked in, the flip-flop of doubt between characters in the whodunnit was interesting but there was far too much of it – it just left me crying out to tell me who it was already so I could finish the book! I also found I didn’t really care for any of the characters; even before Toby’s accident he isn’t a very likeable person, he also seems to have no idea what he’s like as a person - even sitting in the pub at the very beginning of the book. The only person I really routed for was Melissa but I thought even she was under-used and was a missed potential by the end.

Overall, The Wych Elm has a good story in there somewhere but there is far too much padding to drag you down before you get to the good ending. Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Books UK – Viking for the chance to read the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Starting this book was a little daunting as it seems like quite a hefty tome to get through and at the start I was left wondering when something was going to happen. There is a huge amount of dialogue, all of it brilliantly observed and written, but I wondered if all of it was necessary. I told myself to relax and just enjoy the observations and the minutiae and I was blown away by the extraordinary detail and the story that was being laid out before me line by perfect line.

After being attacked in his own home Toby faces a slow recovery both physically and mentally. When an opportunity presents itself to return to Ivy House, the family home, now lived in solely by his uncle Hugo, Toby is unsure but convinced by his girlfriend, Melissa he goes and finds himself healing through fond memories, distraction and a renewed relationship with his Uncle Hugo.

However, the simple life does not last for long when the skull and subsequently the body of a childhood friend is found in the hollow of a Wych Elm in the garden. Trying to claw back lost memories and stirring up secrets that some would rather keep hidden the reader is left wondering if Toby is the person he seems to be and how far a person will go to protect themselves and those they love.

There was plenty of twists and turns in this book and an unexpected ending. The writing is truly spectacular, Tana French has an amazing talent for really delivering on each characters traits and lays there personality bare before you. A great read.

The Wych Elm, a standalone character-driven psychological drama, is a subtle slow burner of a novel with much to enjoy throughout its pages. It's beautifully plotted and the writing is some of the best in the business for keeping you rushing through it to find out what happens. This is a pretty profound crime novel which plays with the issue of perception vs reality and that really ramps up the suspense as you have no idea if the characters are recalling memories as they actually were or merely as they perceive them to be. I thoroughly appreciate this subtle type of tale as it makes a refreshing change from standard thrillers.

However, I do feel that it could've been edited down a little without losing any of the substance and tightening it up would make it more compelling. The slow nature of it may also make it a difficult read for some, but I enjoyed savouring it. I am a big fan of the unreliable narrator, and here, Ms French puts a wholly unique spin on it. Main protagonist Toby is recovering from an attack which has left him with brain damage, memory issues and both physical and psychological scars; this changes his grip on reality quite significantly. All in all, this is a novel that looks at the repercussions of being caught up in a crime and the struggle to recover.

Many thanks to Viking for an ARC.

[To be published March 4th on The Nerd Daily]

“I’ve always considered myself to be, basically, a lucky person” reads the opening line of this explosive novel—a bold, boasting statement. Immodestly intentioned or not, author Tana French works swiftly and severely to disabuse protagonist Toby Hennessy of this privileged notion with an unfolding clamorous series of catastrophic events that work in concert to tectonically shift any sure sense of self and circumstance. Superficially, Toby leads a charmed life—he has a supportive and sensible girlfriend, Melissa, an aspirational job in PR for a trendy gallery, easy evenings spent in the company of two long-term chums (Sean and Dec) in a pleasant blur of drinks and good cheer.

However, from the start, small pulses of unease manifest, mostly in the form of gestating adult responsibilities, the siren calls of marriage and careers, but French is also masterful at exposing the ways in which allegedly affectionate teasing amongst close-knit individuals may scratch aggressively at long-standing resentments and insecurities. Most troublingly, Toby becomes embroiled in a fraudulent situation at work that anticipates the novel’s preeminent exploration of identity crisis.

Upon returning home from an evening out, lapsing into inebriated sleep, Toby is awoken by the presence of two thieves in his home, whom he initially confronts with furious indignation (“outrage slammed through my body like rocket fuel”), only to be quickly overcome by violent retribution. French writes this section with an almost unbearable visceral candour-every bruise, every punch, every kick, every sick crunch of bone is relayed with punishing physical clarity. Sentences convey, in their clipped, accelerated, tumbling structural force the fragmented moments of savagery, Toby desperately attempting to keep hold of a coherent trajectory of events. Mind and senses reeling, barely alive, Toby is left with nothing but pieces, spiralling into a vortex of fear and anxiety (“I’d never known anything like it: all consuming, ravenous…misshapen, taloned”). All assurance and confidence, all that is thought safely known, is now reduced to pulverised matter—French communicates with terrifying immediacy the ways in which a vicious assault can break a person apart.

Left with a pronounced limp, a speech impediment, and vastly compromised powers of concentration, as well as feeling generally one step aside from ordinary existence, Toby seeks a convalescence at Ivy House, his ancestral home, revealed in all its ramshackle splendour by French—a reader senses every mote of dust, peel of paint, soil mark of water, every mossy overgrowth of garden. As Uncle Hugo, the bachelor caretaker of the property, has recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer, the perfect opportunity for Toby to spend an indefinite period of time presents itself (Melissa accompanies him). His stay also offers him the time to reconnect with his cousins Susanna and Leon, with whom he shared many an idyllic summer and escapade. Susanna, once a socially conscientious firebrand, is now a harried mother married to a sweet, if dull man, and Leon, bullied in youth for his sexuality, has become a restless and reckless hedonist, unable to commit long-term.

The discovery of a human skull in a crevasse of the gothic arboreal majesty of the titular tree occasions a dread in the family, dredging up dark secrets, stirring the muck and mire of hidden history. The victim is determined to be a figure known to all assembled, a difficult, domineering classmate prone to tyranny and false entitlement. Through the ensuing investigation, conducted by the cunningly efficient yet unnervingly menacing Detective Martin, Toby is forced to continually reassess his perspective in regards to his past. Already on unsteady ground, his conversations with his cousins are cause for further destabilisation, as their more grievous memories conflict with his oblivious remembrances. Worse yet, adverse speculation forces Toby to consider he harbours traits and capabilities of dire incivility, impossible to imagine—“what made me so sure what type of person I was, what I could and couldn’t have done?…a monstrous imposter burgeoning with incomprehensible, unstoppable transformations”.

Yet it is not only that Toby must recalibrate his presuppositions of self, revelations in regards to the behaviour and actions of his sibling-like cousins also come to a boil in the hothouse environment of the murder inquiry. Like the tangled, dilapidated, derelict grounds of the estate, long gone to ruinous neglect, so grow the roots of the cousins’ knotted, gnarled personal history. Just as the ancient tree is felled, pulling up earth and dirt buried for ages, exposing to the light what has long dwelt in the dark, conversation spikes to new levels of unlacquered frankness as the cousins scrutinise their teenage years. One such thrilling twilight confessional drives a lengthy good segment of the final third of the novel, but the steady, alarming spill of disclosures does lead into the startling, climactic action brimming with the buzz of exhaustion, despair, a soul rubbed raw, a rush back to self at a terrible cost—“I felt it: the impossible rush of it…me standing tall…gasping air like a man rising from some purifying river”. Some may quibble that French slightly overstretches the material in this culminating section, although the epic temporal and philosophical canvas she is crafting mostly justifies the extensiveness.

In the end, Toby is no further along in resolving his central questions. The concept of luck remains elusive—a thing granted, earned, or absolutely arbitrary? More so than the fading physical ailments, psychological unease has lodged indeterminably, a consequence of excavated secrets, a permanent claim or stain upon the soul. The struggle will continue long past the closing paragraph. “Only the lines on the monitor scribbling out of control…give us a glimpse of what was going on in secret, in the dark inside him”, Toby observes from his dying uncle’s bedside.

Tana French’s finely detailed, fiercely lyrical scribbles reveal tantalising glimpses into such cavernous internal mysteries. She, like the wych elm itself, as the Greeks believed, stands at the gateway of an underworld—French bravely peers in the chasm, illuminating darkness.

This was my first Tana French novel and I was extremely impressed. French spends the first third of the novel setting the scene with descriptions of the narrator Toby's charmed life, family, and friendships and while I was intrigued I was unsure quite where the plot was going. Once Toby's need for recuperation from a head injury and his Uncle's diagnosis of a terminal illness occur, the focus moves to The Ivy House, the hub of the family where Toby and his cousins spent a lot of their childhood. From here on there are plenty of twists as Toby experiences how trauma affects personality, confidence and people's motivations. French crafts complex characters and highlights the unreliability of memories adding up to an intelligent pageturner.

The Wych Elm by Tana French

Toby Hennessy considers himself a lucky man. He’s handsome, charming and nothing bad ever seems to happen to him. He has the talent of being able to talk himself out of blame and punishment. Then one night this all changed. After an evening out in the pub with his two oldest friends, Toby returned home to sleep it off but he is woken up by two burglars. Toby’s very badly hurt with a head injury that leaves him with brain damage. His confidence is lost, his vision of the world around him shattered and his easy ability to communicate the way he did before is gone for good. He takes refuge in his family’s ancestral home, the Ivy House, and there Toby and his girlfriend can take care of Toby’s uncle Hugh, a man nearing the end of his life. In a way it’s almost like the old days with Toby’s cousins Susanna and Leon popping in with parents and children in tow for Sunday lunches and chatter. But when a skull is found in the old wych elm in the house’s gorgeous garden, nothing will ever be the same again.

The Wych Elm (or The Witch Elm as it’s called in the US) is an outstanding novel by Tana French. Standing alone, it tells the story of the disintegration of Toby and his family from the point of view of Toby, who, due to his brain damage, is the ultimate unreliable narrator. His injury means that he finds it difficult to express himself. It also means that he has lost or re-shaped memories. He no longer knows himself. He’s a man hanging on, particularly to his lovely girlfriend Melissa and to old familiar things. Hugh is a genealogist and Toby finds comfort in helping him.

Although crime plays its part in The Wych Elm and life is turned upside down by the discovery of the skull in the tree, this isn’t exactly a crime novel. It moves leisurely and carefully as Toby tries to understand what’s happening, remembering the past, grasping for the truth from Susanna and Leon, digging up secrets. It’s an absolutely fascinating portrayal of a small group of people and it isn’t rushed. If I’d been expecting a tense novel of suspense then I would have had to readjust my expectations. But it most certainly isn’t a slow novel. The Wych Elm is thoroughly compelling and I raced through its pages. It’s the type of story that can obsess the reader. It did me. I longed to pick it up whenever I could.

There are detectives in The Wych Elm and, for me, they are one of the highlights, one detective especially. They have an oppressive, disturbing presence, the likes of which I don’t think I’ve encountered before. They are the menacing shadows of this world. Of course, we see them through Toby’s troubled eyes but nevertheless there is something about this one detective in particular that frightened me. At times this is a very disturbing novel. This beautiful old house with its gorgeous garden and happy memories is also a place of monsters.

The Wych Elm is about people and place, memories and self-knowledge, families and being alone. And so much more than that. I was completely beguiled by it. I did feel a little disappointed by the ending, I must admit, possibly because by this stage I had my own idea about how I wished the story to end, but, nevertheless, this is a novel I won’t forget. It’s a glorious achievement and such a rewarding read. It made me very sorry that I haven’t read a Tana French novel before. I know I’ll be reading more.

Unlike many other reviewers, I’ve never read anything by this author so delved into it with no preconceptions. I found it intelligently written and the characters and scenes described to great detail which is fine except that as the book is quite large, I was left wondering when it would crack on with the main storyline. I was surprised that except for a one-sentence mention at the beginning, the “murder” didn’t become apparent until a third of the way through the book.

Toby considers himself lucky – his life is charmed. He gets ahead in life using that very charm, though not always in the most laudable way. Indeed, as the teller of this story, he himself seems somewhat blind to his own flaws and can’t quite believe it when he gets into deeper trouble than he could have imagined. Almost overnight his world shatters as he gets into trouble at work and then is badly beaten in his home, leaving him with a serious injury that may be part post-traumatic psychological injury, part physical brain injury, but either way he starts to unravel. At the end of his tether, he ends up at Ivy House, caring for his dying uncle and forced to face his wider family with whom he has love-hate relationships. Everything comes to a head following a horrific discovery in the trunk of the old Wych Elm in the garden, and a murder inquiry ensues.

Toby’s injuries mean he can’t think straight and the mystery surrounding this probable murder and it’s relation, if any, to him and his family lead him down a dark path as he begins to wonder who he really is at heart and who his siblings really are. He thought he knew them so well and now all is not what it seemed. When he himself comes under suspicion, he faces his world completely falling apart … or perhaps this will be the challenge that could give him a reason to go on?

We have here not just any old murder mystery but an extremely skilful exploration of the characters involved as we view events of the past and present through the eyes of those involved – including the detectives – as the writer explores bigger themes of identity, true friendship and family dynamics. How well can we really know someone else?

This is way more than your common and garden thriller and I found it utterly absorbing. I note some reviewers who were familiar with Tana French’s work were disappointed that this was ‘not like’ her better-known series, but I had not read any of her other works and I was far from disappointed. On the contrary, this was a deeply satisfying read and, to my mind, puts Tana French up there with the best of those crime writers who give us more than a banal whodunnit.

An interesting look at post-trauma stress.

Toby has managed to save his job after some rather clever analysis as to why his boss, Richard should not fire him. He’s so pleased with the fact, that instead of simply a few drinks with his friends, Dec and Sean, he gets very drunk and instead of going to his girlfriend, Melissa’s, he decides to return to his own flat. Mistakes that are going to have serious repercussions for him as two yobs break in and he tries to stop them resulting in him being seriously injured, causing very serious brain injuries.

When he eventually leaves the hospital, his memory is still very patchy. He has developed a limp and slurred speech. Physiotherapy helps, but with the brain damage, it’s decided that he can’t return to work immediately. Instead, he moves in with his uncle Hugo, who has been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. Hugo has always been the rock not only in Toby’s life but also for his cousins, Susanna and Leon. They are similar in age and since early childhood has spent all their holidays with Hugo at Ivy House.

Zach and Sallie, Susanna’s children are exploring the garden at Ivy House. The adults here a scream and discover that Zach while exploring the mighty cavity within the Wych Elm, has dislodged a skull. The police are called and a body is discovered hidden in the Wych Elm. It turns out that it’s a boy who went to school with the three cousins. Why would he be hidden in their uncle’s tree?

I’m still in two minds about this book. I loved the characters, especially Melissa, Toby’s girlfriend. However, I found a lot of the story repetitive, the drinking, smoking dope and trying to suss out the identity of the murderer. I found myself saying, “Not again!” many times during the five-hundred-odd pages but was scared that if I skipped some of the narratives, I might miss an important piece of information. On reflection, I could have easily sped-read lots of the dialogue!

There have been rave reviews of this book. Would I want to add my voice to them? The idea of finding a skeleton buried in a family garden was brilliant and that alone deserves five stars. The discovery of the real murderer was also unexpected, but it’s the bits in-between that annoyed and bored me to tears.

Treebeard

Breakaway Reviewers received a copy of the book to review.

The Wych Elm by Tana French is a long book and it starts very slowly, so it’s a book to savour rather than one to rush through. I was engrossed in this psychological thriller, a standalone book, as dark family secrets gradually came to light. It isn’t a page-turner and yet it is full of mystery and suspense about a family in crisis.

Toby Hennessy, the narrator, is twenty eight. He’s a good looking and charming young man from an affluent and supportive family who love him. He has had an easy start to life, everything had just seemed to fall into place for him. He works for an art gallery in the centre of Dublin, where he does the gallery’s PR and is thinking of getting a place together with his girl friend, Melissa. But then his luck and his life change dramatically when he is brutally attacked by burglars in his flat, leaving him in a terrible state, physically and psychologically damaged. The first mystery is to find out why he was burgled and so savagely beaten. The police investigation doesn’t get very far and Toby is left to solve it himself – for a while at least.

He then learns that his Uncle Hugo has terminal cancer and he and Melissa go to stay with him at the Hennessy family home, the Ivy House, to care for Hugo and to recuperate. Their large family – his parents, his aunts and uncles, and his cousins, Susanna and Leo – descend on Ivy House for lunch every Sunday and one Sunday afternoon Susanna’s young children discover a human skull in the hollow trunk of a wych elm, the biggest tree in the garden.

So there is a second mystery to be solved – and one that is slowly unravelled taking Toby back to his teenage years and he realises that there was so much going on in his friends’ and cousins’ lives that he had just not known about. It’s as though he was cocooned within his own comfortable bubble, totally unaware of the bullying and struggles that other people had to face. He really finds it hard to come to terms with this. Much of the rest of the book is made up of long conversations with his uncle and cousins and the police investigations.

The Wych Elm is an intense book, digging deeply into the nature of privilege, luck and empathy, with the dynamics of relationship, with memory and coming to terms with the past and with death. There were times when I wasn’t sure just how reliable Toby was as a narrator and then I wondered which of the other characters were telling the truth. The account of Hugo’s illness, the way he copes with it and his family’s reactions are completely convincing. This is a nuanced book, with several complex layers and when I wasn’t reading it I was still thinking about it. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

My thanks to the publishers, Penguin UK, for my review copy via NetGalley.

A new Tana French novel is the highlight of my reading year. ‘The Wych Elm’ is a departure from her Dublin Murder Squad crime novels in the sense that the story is told from the perspective of the victim of the crime rather than the investigators but, like that series, is a character-driven story which really gets into the psyche of the protagonist.
When we meet Toby he is on a night out with his friends, middle-class Dublin rugby types, apparently fairly harmless, if slightly unlikeable, slightly full of themselves. But, when Toby confronts burglars at his apartment that night, he suffers head injuries and memory loss in a vicious assault. Returning to The Ivy House, his uncle’s home at which he spent a lot of his childhood, Toby’s convalescence is, at first, bolstered by helping his uncle cope with his own, terminal, illness. The two support each other and fall into an easy routine, aided by Toby’s girlfriend, and, through conversations with the cousins with whom he grew up, Toby tries to regain the memories he has lost.
Tana French is a master at these familial relationships, the small interactions, the petty jealousies and misunderstandings between people who ‘love’ each other. Toby is an unreliable narrator, all the more so because of his brain trauma, but there is a sense that each of the characters is hiding something or, at least, reframing their own narratives, editing their own stories. Then the discovery of human remains in the hollow trunk of the ancient Wych Elm tree in the back garden of The Ivy House starts Toby on a path of investigation, casting suspicion on his cousins, his uncle, even himself. As the police tear apart the garden so Toby’s questions open up old wounds, gradually unravelling first his relationships, then his self-image, his sense of who he is.
‘The Wych Elm’ is a story of psychological disintegration told with Tana French’s keen ear for dialogue and ability to get inside the minds of her characters. It is a slower novel than the Dublin Murder Squad books but no less compelling. I enjoyed it and thank Penguin Random House and NetGalley for the early access.

The Wych Elm is the first book I have read by Tana French, so I had no idea what to expect but I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was a slow-burner but in a good way, this was a book to be savoured.

The Wych Elm left me reeling. It was one of those books that stays in your head afterwards.

Toby has been lucky his whole life and he knows it. Then one night he is viciously attacked and left for dead. The attack leaves him changed both physically and mentally to the point where he is barely willing to leave the house.

Toby’s memories of that night are few and those he does have are blurred. Equally damaged are his memories in general, that night has made him doubt everything he knows about himself.

Toby is fed up of everyone tiptoeing around him and is trying desperately to convince people that he is fine, or at least on the mend.

When Toby’s cousin Susanna calls out of the blue asking him to go look after his dying uncle. Toby is reluctant to say the least but then his girlfriend Mellissa talks him into it, and they head for Ivy House.

Then a skull is found in the wych elm in the garden and Toby is forced to question everything he thought he knew including himself.

Ivy House is special to Toby because he and his cousins used to stay there for the summer and he has fond memories of it, which explains why he didn’t want to taint those memories by going there in his poor condition.

“I couldn’t even think about being at the Ivy House, not like this…twilight hide-and-seek among the moths and silver birches, wild-strawberry picnics and gingerbread Christmases, endless teenage parties with everyone lying on the grass gazing up at the stars – All that was unreachable now; that night was a flaming sword burning the way. The Ivy House was the one place that, more than any other I couldn’t bear to see from this far shore.”

Hugo, Toby’s uncle was my favourite character in The Wych Elm and his deterioration was handled delicately.

One of the twists in the book felt slightly unrealistic to me but that didn’t attract from my enjoyment of the book. I won’t say which one though as I don’t want to ruin the story for anyone.

I am really pleased I chose to request this book for review.

Having never read any Tana French before, I was looking forward to reading this, due to the description/plot. I did enjoy it, although I found the pace a little slow at times, although I imagine that would be a reflection on how the characters were feeling - when you're potentially being accused of murder, life must slow down quite alot.

The characters were believeable, relatable, annoying, and plain irritating - a perfect reflection of a large family! A few plot twists here and there to lead you in the wrong direction, although the discovery of who commited the crime didn't surprise me at all! What surprised me was what followed after!

All in all an enjoyabel read.