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Actress
Actress
paperback
Published:
17 June, 2021
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Description
‘Written with all the ingenuity and twisty tautness of a thriller’ The Times
From the Booker-winning Irish author, 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 told 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 . . .
Prizes
Long-listed for Womens Prize for Fiction 2020 (UK)
More Details
| Type | Book |
|---|---|
| ISBN13 | 9781529112139 |
| ISBN10 | 1529112133 |
| Number Of Pages | 272 |
| Item Weight | 197 g |
| Product Dimensions | 129 x 197 x 16 mm |
| Publisher / Reseller | Vintage Publishing |
| Format | paperback |
Media Reviews
A perfect jewel of a book, a dark emerald set in the Irish laureate’s fictional tiara, alongside her Man Booker Prize winner The Gathering (2007) and The Green Road (2015). 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 *
Anne Enright, the unofficial rock star of literary fiction, cements her stardom with Actress. * Irish Times *
Actress absolutely enthralled me… [An] immersive, masterful novel. * Red Magazine *
In Katherine O’Dell, her fictional fallen star of stage and screen…Enright has created a heroine as irresistible to the reader as to her audiences… She has become a byword for contemporary Irish literary fiction at its finest. * Guardian *
May I recommend Actress by Anne Enright. Her writing is always pitch perfect, but this is truly exquisite. If there is such a thing as the perfect novel, this is it.
Anne Enright's gorgeous book Actress raised an enviable bar: uniquely, in modern fiction, a novelist who can do justice to portraying a modern actor. * New Statesman *Books of the Year* *
Written with all the ingenuity and twisty tautness of a thriller…[Actess], which vividly recreates the bohemian world of the theatre, is a study of love that is all the more uplifting because it is unsparing… I read Actress absolutely rapt from cover to cover. * The Times *
The best novel involving theatre since Angela Carter’s Wise Children… This novel achieves what no real actor’s memoir could… Enright triumphs as a chameleon: memoirist, journalist, critic, daughter – her emotional intelligence knows no bounds. * Observer *
GoodReads Reviews
Author's Bio
Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has written two collections of stories, published together as Yesterday's Weather, one book of non-fiction, Making Babies, and eight novels, including The Gathering, which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize. Other award include the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for The Forgotten Waltz, the Irish Book Awards Lifetime Achievement Award and Novel of the Year (which she has won twice), the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Contribution to Irish Literature and the Seamus Heaney Award for Arts and Letters. In 2015 she was appointed as the first Laureate for Irish Fiction. Most recently she won the 2024 Writers' Prize for Fiction and the 2025 Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction.