*LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE 2020*
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE DALKEY LITERARY NOVEL OF THE YEAR AWARD 2021*

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.

**A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN TIME MAGAZINE, IRISH TIMES AND NEW STATESMAN**

From the greatest living Irish author, a brilliant and moving novel about fame, sexual power, and a daughter's search to understand her mother's hidden truths

About the Author
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 six novels, including The Gathering, which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize, The Forgotten Waltz, which was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and The Green Road, which was the Bord Gais Energy Novel of the Year and won the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. In 2015 she was appointed as the first Laureate for Irish Fiction, and in 2018 she received the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Contribution to Irish Literature.

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 * Spectator *
Anne Enright, the unofficial rock star of literary fiction, cements her stardom with Actress. -- Niamh Donnelly * Irish Times *
Actress absolutely enthralled me... [An] immersive, masterful novel. -- Anya Meyerowitz * 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. -- Lisa Allardice * 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. -- 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 * 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. -- Melanie Phillips * 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. -- Kate Kellaway * Observer *
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 * The Times *
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 * Irish Times *Books of the Year* *


Awards
Long-listed for Womens Prize for Fiction 2020 (UK).



Book Information
ISBN 9781787332065
Author Anne Enright
Format Hardback
Page Count 272
Imprint Jonathan Cape Ltd
Publisher Vintage Publishing
Weight(grams) 392g
Dimensions(mm) 222mm * 144mm * 144mm