Shadowplay
4/5
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About this ebook
WINNER: NOVEL OF THE YEAR, An Irish Post Book Awards
Shadowplay 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.
“Funny, smart, tender, wise.”—Colum McCann, author of Apeirogon
“Joseph O’Connor’s magnificent novel does even more than fly, it soars.”—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
FINALIST 2019 COSTA BOOK OF THE YEAR,
FINALIST 2020 DALKEY LITERARY AWARD, 2020 WALTER SCOTT PRIZE
Joseph O’Connor
Joseph O’Connor’s Shadowplay was named Novel of the Year at the 2019 Irish Book Awards and was a finalist for the prestigious Costa Book Award. His novel Star of the Sea was published in thirty-eight languages and 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.
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Reviews for Shadowplay
22 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A novel based on the life of Bram Stoker and how he came to write Dracula. A large part of this includes his time in London where he was Sir Henry Irving’s stage manager at the Lyceum, and also his relationship with the National Treasure who was Ellen Terry. Beautifully written, lyrical and captivating. It has also won the Irish Book of the Year award and quite deservedly so.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5It is obvious any author wants an idea for a book, but O'Connor, by his own admission at the end, has taken the facts and ignored them. What he has done is written a book that the casual reader might take as biographical and end up with a totally erroneous view of the history of the characters involved, and of their reputations. To my mind O'Connor has created a romantic novel and tried to make it popular by randomly throwing in causes and incidents of the era and later, and has used the names of famous people for his characters and, in the process, totally twisted and mangled the reality of how these people lived.My poor impression of Joseph O'Connor's work remains intact.
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