The Wych Elm was entirely mesmerising, a standalone novel from Tana French with her acute eye for nuanced character and her beautiful use of language, telling an utterly compelling and genuinely immersive tale that will leave you melancholy.

Toby has never worried about anything, a happy go lucky guy, sure of his place in the world, sure of those around him and casually reliant on his ability to get himself out of hot water should he fall in. Then a vicious attack and a dying stalwart of his childhood changes everything…

The Wych Elm is a slow burning literary delight of a novel. Tana French explores themes of memory, identity and how we view ourselves compared to how others view us – and how we are changed by circumstance and event. The Ivy House, very much a character in its own right sets the scene as a horrifying discovery leaves Toby questioning all his memories of an idyllic childhood spent in the company of his cousins…and how well he really knows them at their heart.

The author weaves an intricate web of time, place and person- through Toby’s experiences, his recovery, his slow understanding of what is going on around him, she makes you feel every moment and it is haunting, fascinating reading.

This is not a novel for anyone who wants an easy pay off or a fast paced resolution- this is one where character is everything, you commit to these people, learn from them and about them, all through the dark glass of Toby’s skewed viewpoint. It pulls you along with it, revealing truths at its own pace, offering a family group dynamic that is subtle and authentic.

I lived it every step of the way. It is a long book that speeds past as if it were the blink of an eye, powerful and layered, intelligently designed and in it’s denouement incredibly sad.

The Wych Elm will stay with me as Tana French novels always do, that is her writing superpower. I’ll never forget Toby, Leon, Su and the rest and it’s one of those books that I’ll definitely revisit, unravelling missed moments and revelling in the poetic prose and immersive settings.

Loved it

Highly Recommended.

Wow, what a book ! Tana is a writer who can have you on the edge of your seat without car-chases, explosions or cliff-hanger chapter endings. The book is told from the point of view of Toby, who after a life changing head injury brought about by an assault, wrestles with PTSD,depression and bouts of amnesia. Nervous about a repeat attack in his own home and with no improvement in his mental or physical condition Toby reluctantly at first, moves into his terminally ill uncles home as a companion in the mans final months.
The rest of the novel is set within the house, a house where Toby and his cousins hung out as teens and his parents and extended family come together. it is During one such gathering, his cousins son makes a discovery in the Wych Elm in the garden that sends the book and Toby from a place of fond memories and comforting routine into something dark and sinister.
Tana beautifully ratchets up the tension from here - the limited cast of characters almost incidental in a way, made in turns benign and malevolent through the distorted lens of Toby’s memory, his inner dialogue both racing and dwelling over past and present.
This is a book you will want to read to the very last page.

’The thing is, I suppose,’ he said, ‘that one gets into the habit of being oneself. It takes some great upheaval to crack that shell and force us to discover what might be underneath.’

The wonderful Tana French has always been at the literary end of the crime fiction spectrum but in this book perhaps she’s crossed the line more completely into literary fiction whose plot happens to involve various crimes. I say this because if you come looking for merely a thriller or police procedural you may well complain about the slowness of the narrative, the detailed attention to Toby’s interiority, the diversionary progression: you may need to re-set your expectations to psychological character study rather than fast-paced page-turner.

In lots of ways, this reminded me of French’s second book 'The Likeness': issues around identity link the two, as well as an atmospheric evocation of the lives of a group of people built around their temporary inhabitation of a house. This, I would say, is a more sophisticated treatment of those tropes, even as they’re doubled between Toby/Melissa/Hugo in the present and Toby/Susanna/Leon in the recalled past.

These are not the only crime fiction motifs that French utilises: the unreliable narrator, memory loss as instrument of suspense have become so over-used and formulaic that they are practically clichés of the genre these days – in French’s masterful hands they become potent again, treated with depth and psychological verisimilitude. And together they feed back into what may be the central mystery under investigation: who is Toby? Not in a cheap ‘disguised identity’ way but in a probing and interrogative mode: is personality and identity a coherent core ‘thing’ or are people made up of shifting layers of needs and actions that cohere only in the most fitful and arbitrary of ways? What happens when someone’s self-identification as a ‘lucky’ person proves itself disastrously untrue? When layers of ‘this is me-ness’ are stripped away and shown to be superficial, even false?

With depth, acute characterisation and significant insight into processes of healing and deterioration, as much as I love French’s Dublin Squad series, this is an exciting departure for her writing.

Tana French is easily one of my favorite authors. I love love love the Dublin Murder Squad series and I always rave about them to my friends and family.

So when I saw that her new book The Wych Elm was coming out and it was a stand alone, my interest was piqued.

Toby is a character that starts off as likable, but a bit of a tosser. The deeper you get into the book, the more you start to realize that Toby actually is not that nice of a person. Toby has actually done a few shitty things and at one point, he gets almost beaten to death for it.
After the attack, Toby moves in with his sick uncle in The Ivy House, a place where he spend a lot of time growing up as a child. At one point, the remains of a human are found in one of the trees on the land and the police gets called in.
Toby wants to try to find out what happened and what follows is a very tense tale of family, growing up and revenge.

I could not put this book down, The characters are so well written, they just jump off the page. The story is thrilling and really exciting to read. Tana French has delivered once again, a superb novel.