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Actress

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Actress

By: Anne Enright
Narrated by: Anne Enright
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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

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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
Everything one might want from a story, a performer and a human being.
Remarkable resonance in every way.

Listen to this.

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Astonishingly beautiful writing and a wonderful deft reading, every nuance captured so naturally. Thank you. Bravo.

Actress

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Actress by Anne Enright

“ I was the most real thing in the room, I was right there, I had been all along. Because tucked inside her on the day she shot out into the world was the little egg of me... She told me that I was nested inside her from the day she was born, like a little Russian doll.”

Actress is the imaginary biography of Katherine O’Dell, written by her fictitious daughter, Norah. A story of an intimate and flawed mother and daughter relationship. It follows O’Dell’s rise and fall; from stardom to her grave. Norah is perfectly placed to tell this story.

Anne Enright is a keen observer and writes with a sharp eye and subtle evocation of her characters’ emotional rollercoaster. It is a finely crafted piece of literary fiction. Exploring themes of sexuality, #metoo, mental health, Ireland’s tumultuous history and the stage; this is a superbly crafted book. * may contain triggers*

Anne Enright narrates the audiobook herself, something I always love. To hear the book and it’s nuances exactly as the writer intended is a wonderful thing. Her Irish accent adds to the depth of the experience.

This wasn’t a book I was expecting or anticipating this month but something drew me to begin the audiobook...I’m so glad I did.

A beautifully crafted novel.

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A remarkable character study and an unforgettable story about a mother-daughter relationship that, in Anne's inimitable style, casts an unsentimental yet deeply empathetic eye on the vulnerabilities and resiliences that make us human. An exceptional writer with a rare gift at evoking time and place - and an eye for peculiar or distinctive detail that makes you feel you've just found words for things you've always known but never named.
It look me a little while to get used to her reading voice but I warmed to it very much. There were times though in the earlier part when I found it hard to make out certain words in the lower register and needed to adjust volume a bit.

standing ovation

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Kept away from Dublin this has been a real comfort. it has let me pretend I'm not so far away.

Like being back home

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