Audition - A Novel

INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER

A tightly wound family drama that reads like a psychological thriller." NPR

Bold, stark, genre-bending, Audition will haunt your dreams. The Boston Globe

One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. An exhilarating, destabilizing Möbius 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.

Rezension:

NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2025 BY THE WASHINGTON POST, VOGUE, ROLLING STONE, NBC.COM, THE GUARDIAN, AND THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Kitamura excels at creating an atmosphere of foreboding [She] reveals how much lies beneath the surfaces of our bodies and our sentences, and how much about one another we cannot know.
The New Republic

What Kitamura does is different. She is one of very few serious fiction writers who insist on not only describing but enacting the mirrored maze of impaired intimacy the frustrating, unaccommodating realism we twenty-first-century dwellers deserve.
Harper s

A brilliantly disarming read.
Bustle

Slim, yet powerful.
Town & Country

Katie Kitamura writes with a spare, almost clinical efficiency, but that doesn t limit the depth of her characters or the complexity of the dynamics she depicts The strange pendulum swing from one scenario to the other catches you off guard and isn t that the mark o f truly exciting fiction?
Vogue

Beguiling Kitamura chooses to upend everything as her story creeps toward a brutal climax. Hypnotic and finely observant sleek, provocative a must for literary collections and for book club discussions.
Library Journal

[An] elegant knife of a story. . . So much glints below the surface in [Kitamura s] purring, pared-down sentences. . .In this searing, chilly, and psychologically profound story lies insight into some harrowing human questions.
Kirkus, starred review

Kitamura serves up a taut and alluring novel complex and engrossing Readers won t be able to put this down.
Publishers Weekly, starred review

Kitamura is a master of writing people who are both inscrutable and glaringly, psychically alive, which is to say real people, and obfuscation seems the point here, making this a perfect fit for readers of literary-puzzle novels.
Booklist

"Katie Kitamura is a dizzyingly ski lled writer whose fictions always seem to manage two contradictory effects: a supple seductive surface, under which the chaos of minds and repressed realities roil. She s an original, building an entire metier of her own."
Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers and The Mars Room

You have never read anything like this gorgeously disquieting book. Audition challenges our preconceptions about love, art, and selfhood and, magnificently, our very idea of how a novel should unfold. If all the world s a stage, Kitamura reminds us that we never stop auditioning for our parts.
Hernan Diaz, author of Trust

Katie Kitamura is one of our most brilliant writers, saying far more in her silences, blank spaces, and disruptions than most novelists can say in a hundred thousand words. Audition is eerie, a book so cold it feels hot. It hooked into my mind like a burr.
Lauren Groff, author of The Vaster Wilds and Fates and Furies