A beautifully written, atmospheric and engaging book which reminded me very much of The Secret History. Tana French is an expert at capturing South Co Dublin and a privileged generation whose lives are not as charmed as they might first appear

This is another outstanding book from Tana French. I think her Dublin Murder Squad series has been excellent and this stand-alone book is just as good. It’s a psychological thriller which of itself would have put me off rather; dd to this a description including a damaged, unreliable narrator and dark family secrets coming to light and frankly, if it had been by almost anyone else I wouldn’t have bothered. However, French takes these well-worn tropes and makes something rich and rewarding from them.

The plot revolves around the narrator, Toby, a good looking, intelligent young man from a comfortable, supportive family whose life so far has been an easy cruise, smoothed by circumstance and easy charm. However, at the very start of the book he suffers a head trauma which changes everything. This is followed by a grisly discovery in the garden of a family house; the police investigate and slowly a past of which Toby has been blissfully unaware begins to emerge.

This is a long book at over 500 pages and events unfold slowly, but it never dragged at all for me. French is brilliant at creating wholly believable characters and situations and her portrait of someone trying to come to terms with genuine struggle for the first time in his life is exceptionally good. Anyone who has had to watch someone they love go through a terminal illness will recognise that this, too, is superbly and sensitively done...and so on. And throughout all this runs an increasingly tense plot as Toby tries to piece events together. French writes lovely, unfussy but very evocative prose, and her ear for dialogue is superb, I think. I found it compulsively readable and utterly engrossing throughout.

In short, this is a very fine novel with crime as its driver but which is much, much more than just a thriller and is in a wholly different league from the usual “Gripping Psychological Thrillers.” It’s definitely one of my books of the year and very, very warmly recommended.

(My thanks to Penguin for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Thankyou Thankyou Thankyou! Netgalley and publishers I can’t tell u how I felt when I got the email to say I was being given the opportunity to read this stand alone tana French,one of my fave authors .
Right now down to business
Ok having read a lot of reviews this appears to be a marmite novel for tana ,u either love it or hate it. I was glad I read the reviews as this helped me a lot to go in more with an open mind as opposed to expecting it to be still a thriller at the fore
This is a novel about Toby ,his life ,his place in his world and his inability to see sometimes others and their struggles.
I like a slow burn so didn’t mind that it takes its time ,it is maybe a little bit too long but not by much and I like a novel that builds on characters their pasts and there present .
I cd picture ivy house ,I loved Hugo ,I found the cousins intriguing and cd have easily read a novel on them two alone ,what lies beneath that wife and mother juggling family life ,well I suspect a whole lot!
Toby interested me ,at times I thought oooh interesting here we see someone vulnerable yet we also have times where his character is quite unlikable ,his joking about his best mate went a bit too far in my option where banter cd become more on the side of bullying
His clear sepeertaion from his cousins as he can’t relate to people who have had struggles ,he has seen life as easy and is ignorant to the pain of others ,in fact he doesn’t think at sometimes bar his own amusement
I liked tana doing this ,it’s brave ,to have a character that’s not all good or all bad ,yes we do read but for me he was a little more on the cusp of sheer shallowness ,his past in the main and his inability to truly feel things or see them for what they are .
There are comsequnces
Then ending was great ,again felt wonderfully happy tana took that route ,angle on mental health yes but a part of me also thought he may have acted like that for other reasons,to see what it felt like ,to have that feeling others did when they did something similar .
I do get others frustrations but if u see it as fiction with mystery around it as opposed to a page turning thriller u won’t be disappointed .
I will always buy this author ,I’ve read every single one and though I prefer Dublin murder squad due to personal choice as I love a who done it page turner and her complex laying thisndoesnt mean this novel is written any less better .
It gets four for me because of the diffirent elements to Toby ,and not making him a totally sympathetic character ,and the ending ,the action Toby does usually that wd be at the beginning or middle and u just think woooh wat u gonna do now
Tana works it all out
Roll on the next one where I be praying I will be able to get another opportunity early on to read it as I find waiting very hard

I haven't read any Tana French books, but hear so much good stuff about them that I was quite eager to get into this one.

I must say that I enjoyed this more than I thought I would.

We meet Toby, who is a bit of a 'meh' guy. He trundles along all happy and arrogant, and I don't know whether we are meant to like him or not, but there is something off about him. He's OK. I just think that if I knew him in real life, I would think he was really annoying.

Toby has to go back to a relative's home where he spent some time as a child growing up and one day his second cousin finds a body - well whats left of one - in the trunk of an old tree. We then explore what happened, and I think I started to like Toby less from here - when we get to really know him.

This one is a slow burner, but it is worth the wait. As I said, I haven't read any Tana French books before, so I don't know if this is her writing style, but it was very good. I would recommend this one to any thriller fans. Although I may not describe this as a thriller, I'm not sure what I'd call it. Perhaps a disturbing subtle horror?! But in a good way! :)

In any case, worth a read, and I'm glad I got the chance to read it.

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.