Audition

"Kitamura's novels are short, sharp and deadly. I'm not sure there's anyone better writing in America today."--The Guardian

One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. An exhilarating, destabilizing M?bius strip of a novel that asks whether we ever really know the people we love.

Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She's an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He's attractive, troubling, young--young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day - partner, parent, creator, muse - and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.

Taut and hypnotic, Audition is Katie Kitamura at her virtuosic best.

Author: Katie Kitamura
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Published: 04/08/2025
Pages: 208
Binding Type: Hardcover
ISBN: 9780593852323


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 01/01/2025 pg. 3
Publishers Weekly 01/20/2025
Kirkus Reviews 02/01/2025

About the Author
Katie Kitamura is the author of four previous novels, most recently A Separation and Intimacies, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award and was a finalist for a Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She is a recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature, a Lannan fellowship, and many other honors, and her work has been translated into twenty-one languages. She teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.