Actress: A Novel

Product Description

One of Time’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2020 A Washington Post Notable Work of Fiction in 2020 Longlisted for the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction A brilliant and moving novel about celebrity, sexual power, and a daughter’s search to understand her mother’s hidden truths.
Katherine O’Dell is an Irish theater legend. As her daughter, Norah, retraces her mother’s celebrated career and bohemian life, she delves into long-kept secrets, both her mother’s and her own. Katherine began her career on Ireland’s bus-and-truck circuit before making it to London’s West End, Broadway, and finally Hollywood. Every moment of her life is a performance, with young Norah standing in the wings. But the mother-daughter romance cannot survive Katherine’s past or the world’s damage. With age, alcohol, and dimming stardom, Katherine’s grip on reality grows fitful. Fueled by a proud and long-simmering rage, she commits a bizarre crime.
As Norah’s role gradually changes to Katherine’s protector, caregiver, and finally legacy-keeper, she revisits her mother’s life of fiercely kept secrets; and Norah reveals in turn the secrets of her own sexual and emotional coming-of-age story. Her narrative is shaped by three braided searches―for her father’s identity; for her mother’s motive in donning a Chanel suit one morning and shooting a TV producer in the foot; and her own search for a husband, family, and work she loves.
Bringing to life two generations of women with difficult sexual histories, both assaulted and silenced, both finding―or failing to find―their powers of recovery, Actress touches a raw and timely nerve. With virtuosic storytelling and in prose at turns lyrical and knife-sharp, Enright takes readers to the heart of the maddening yet tender love that binds a mother and daughter.

Review

“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 from Anne Enright.” — Ron Charles ―
Washington Post

“Gorgeously written fiction…Enright’s unflinching portrait…is scrupulously developed and painfully moving.” — Wendy Smith ―
Boston Globe

“There is something that seems effortless about Ms. Enright’s writing―an illusion, of course, but one brilliantly sustained.” — Sam Sacks ―
Wall Street Journal

“Captivating.” — Sara Resnick ―
The New Yorker

“Intoxicating.” — Mary Gordon ―
New York Times

“Another triumph for Enright: a confluence of lyrical prose, immediacy, warmth, and emotional insight.” ―
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“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)

From the Back Cover

Praise for Anne Enright:
“With Anne Enright, we are always in the country of the first-rate. Her work is stark, clear, authoritative, funny and inventive. We come away from her books consistently refreshed and renewed. She understands the full capacity of our stories and our language, braiding them together with apparent ease.” – Colum McCann, winner of the National Book Award and author of Let the Great World Spin
 
Praise for The Green Road:
A Washington Post Best Fiction Book of the Year
“Hugely readable…The Green Road should confirm Enright’s status as one of our greatest living novelists.” – John Sutherland, The Times
“Anne Enright has been writing brilliant, glittering fiction for 25 years…[H]er gaze is cool…[H]er eye is lethal…The surgical precision of her writing can…make you feel that she can, in Wordsworth’s words, ‘see into the life of things.’ Anne Enright is a master.” – Christina Patterson, Sunday Times
 
Praise for The Forgotten Waltz:
Best Book of the Year (Vogue)
“Enright’s razor-sharp writing turns every ordinary detail into a weapon, to create a story that cuts right to the bone.” – New York Journal of Books

About the Author

Anne Enright is author of five novels,