Shadowplay

SHORTLISTED 2019 COSTA BOOK OF THE YEARIrish Book Awards NOVEL OF THE YEARShadowplay by New York Times best-selling author, Joseph O'Connor, is set during the golden age of West End theater in a… Lue lisää SHORTLISTED 2019 COSTA BOOK OF THE YEARIrish Book Awards NOVEL OF THE YEARShadowplay by New York Times best-selling author, Joseph O'Connor, is set during the golden age of West End theater in a London shaken by the crimes of Jack the Ripper. Henry Irving is Victorian London's most celebrated actor and theater impresario. He has introduced groundbreaking ideas to the theater, bringing to the stage performances that are spectacular, shocking, and always entertaining. When Irving decides to open his own London theater with the goal of making it the greatest playhouse on earth, he hires a young Dublin clerk harboring literary ambitions by the name of Bram Stoker to manage it. As Irving's theater grows in reputation and financial solvency, he lures to his company of mummers the century's most beloved actress, the dazzlingly talented leading lady Ellen Terry, who nightly casts a spell not only on her audiences but also on Stoker and Irving both. Bram Stoker's extraordinary experiences at the Lyceum Theatre, his early morning walks on the streets of a London terrorized by a serial killer, his long, tempestuous relationship with Irving, and the closeness he finds with Ellen Terry, inspire him to write DRACULA, the most iconic and best-selling supernatural tale ever published. A magnificent portrait both of lamp-lit London and of lives and loves enacted on the stage, Shadowplay's rich prose, incomparable storytelling, and vivid characters will linger in readers' hearts and minds for many years. Joseph O'Connor's Star of the Sea was an international bestseller, a New York Times, Economist Notable Book of the Year, and a Sunday Times Number 1 bestseller. It won France's Prix Millepages, Italy's Premio Acerbi, the Irish Post Award for Fiction, the Nielsen Bookscan Golden Book Award, an American Library Association Award, the Hennessy/Sunday Tribune Hall of Fame Award, and the Prix Litteraire Zepter for European Novel of the Year. He is the author of nine novels and is the Inaugural Frank McCourt Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Limerick. Shadowplay was named Novel of the Year at the 2019 Irish Book Awards and was a finalist for the prestigious Costa Book Award. "Funny, smart, tender, wise. "--Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin"A marvelous novel . . . Magnificent. "--Suzie Feay, Financial Times