Actress

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* *

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.