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Actress

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Actress

By: Anne Enright
Narrated by: Anne Enright
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Summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

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.

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 2020 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

 Family Life Fiction Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction World Literature Celebrity
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Critic 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. (Ruth Scurr)
Anne Enright, the unofficial rock star of literary fiction, cements her stardom with Actress. (Niamh Donnelly)
Actress absolutely enthralled me… [An] immersive, masterful novel. (Anya Meyerowitz)
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. (Lisa Allardice)
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. (Nigella Lawson)
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. (David Hare)
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. (Melanie Phillips)
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. (Kate Kellaway)
Sentence after sentence is laid down with the solidity of a line of bricks, transforming ordinary life into something beautiful and strange… Every word feels right. (Robert Douglas-Fairhurst)
Anne Enright's Actress remains vivid in my mind many months after reading. No one is better on mothers and daughters. Actress is absorbing, entertaining and beguiling and stole the show for me in 2020. (Helen Cullen)
All stars
Most relevant
loved it. fierce. tender. beautifully told. a mighty story of fame and ordinariness. of deep trauma and compassion.

Anne Enright does it again.

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I have both the physical book and the audio reading, and found myself coming back to this audible version, which is so beautifully read by the author

So beautiful and engrossing

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The characters are so authentically created that the story seems to blur the lines between biography and fiction. So much rich and nuanced detail that I am in awe of the imagination and skilful writing that drew me into their world and made me forget that this was make believe. Add Anne Enright’s fantastic narration and I think it is one of the best audiobook experiences I’ve had in a while. This is being added to my list of Favourite Books right now!

Sublime!

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I love the way she describes things so honestly and creatively. Got a bit bogged down in some of the actress / what she was in etc details - on the US. Great characters though.

The narration!

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It's just that you don't know where the line, the boarder, the transition between the uniqueness of the insight and the sheer delight of the words used is and it strikes me as so unsettlingly beautiful to not know. Some truly remarkable sentences rendering observations profound in how the author positions one to see the consciousness of a person. I want to go and read it now so I can see how the words look on the page.

A mind set to language

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