From Man Booker Prize winner Anne Enright comes the brilliant and moving new novel Actress, 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. But the relationship cannot survive Katherine’s past or the world’s damage. As Katherine’s grip on reality grows fitful with age, alcohol, and dimming stardom, she commits a bizarre crime. Once the victim of a haunting crime herself, Norah understands the destructive love that binds an actress to her audience, but also the strength that an actress takes from her art. Norah eventually becomes a writer, wife, and mother and finds her own hard-won joy. Actress is about the freedom we find in our work and the love we make and keep.
Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has published three volumes of stories, one book of nonfiction, and five novels. In 2015 she was named the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction. Her novel The Gathering won the Man Booker Prize, and The Forgotten Waltz won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.
"Anne Enright has been writing brilliant, glittering fiction for 25 years. . . . Enright is a master."
— Sunday Times