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Shop nowActress
A Novel
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Narrator
Anne Enright
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Length
8 hours 3 minutes
Language
English
Bookseller recommendation
“Author and narrator, Anne Enright, draws you in with her incredible voice and keeps you listening with her brilliant tale of an actress's life as seen through the eyes of her daughter. I found myself wanting to listen to this again as much for Enright's enchanting brogue as for her masterful storytelling.”
— John • Wordsmith Bookshoppe
LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE 2020
Man Booker Prize-winner and bestselling author Anne Enright's latest--a brilliant and moving novel about fame, sexual power, and a daughter's search to understand her mother's hidden truths.
This is the story of Irish theatre legend, Katherine O'Dell, as written by her daughter Norah. It tells of early stardom in Hollywood, of highs and lows on the stages of Dublin and London's West End. Katherine's life is a grand performance, with young Norah watching from the wings.
But this romance between mother and daughter cannot survive Katherine's past, or the world's damage. As Norah uncovers her mother's secrets, she acquires a few of her own. Then, fame turns to infamy when Katherine decides to commit a bizarre crime.
Actress is about a daughter's search for the truth: the dark secret in the bright star, and what drove Katherine finally mad.
Brilliantly capturing the glamour of post-war America and the shabbiness of 1970s Dublin, Actress is an intensely moving, disturbing novel about mothers and daughters and the men in their lives. A scintillating examination of the corrosive nature of celebrity, it is also a sad and triumphant tale of freedom from bad love, and from the avid gaze of the crowd.
ANNE ENRIGHT was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has published three collections of stories, collected as Yesterday’s Weather, one book of non-fiction, Making Babies, and six novels, including The Gathering, which was the Irish Novel of the Year, and won the Irish Fiction Award and the 2007 Man Booker Prize, The Forgotten Waltz, which was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and The Green Road, shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and the International Dublin Literary Award and won the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. From 2015 to 2018 she was the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction. Actress was published in March 2020 and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize.
ANNE ENRIGHT was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has published three collections of stories, collected as Yesterday’s Weather, one book of non-fiction, Making Babies, and six novels, including The Gathering, which was the Irish Novel of the Year, and won the Irish Fiction Award and the 2007 Man Booker Prize, The Forgotten Waltz, which was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and The Green Road, shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and the International Dublin Literary Award and won the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. From 2015 to 2018 she was the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction. Actress was published in March 2020 and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize.
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Reviews
One of Time's Must-Read Books of 2020"Anne Enright writes so well that she just might ruin you for anyone else. . . . Stripped raw of any sentimentality, the result is a critique, a confession, a love letter—and another brilliant novel." —Washington Post
"Gorgeously written fiction. . . . Enright's unflinching portrait . . . is scrupulously developed and painfully moving." —Boston Globe
"A perfect jewel of a book. . . . Its brilliance is complex and multifaceted, but completely lucid . . . Actress is a deeply humane, often darkly funny novel about the exercise of power over sexually attractive women. The grim subject matter is illuminated by Enright's acute sensitivity to language. . . . Enright proves, once again, her genius." —Spectator
"Smart and deep, it's ripe for endless discussion. . . . Actress is arguably [Enright's] great performance." —Globe and Mail
"Enright has created a heroine as irresistible to the reader as to her audiences." —The Guardian
"There is something that seems effortless about Ms. Enright's writing—an illusion, of course, but one brilliantly sustained." —Wall Street Journal
"Written with all the ingenuity and twisty tautness of a thriller . . . [Actress] is a study of love that is all the more uplifting because it is unsparing." —The Times
"Enright's indelible images of the primal love between mother and daughter that ebbs, flows, and ultimately abides will stick with readers." —Booklist (starred review)
"Another triumph for Enright: a confluence of lyrical prose, immediacy, warmth, and emotional insight." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Expand reviews