Audition

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

Katie Kitamura is a dizzyingly skilled 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

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

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

Beguilingly wonderful in its scrutiny of artistic process, ritual and selfhood

Sublime writing from one word to the next, from the first word to the last

Kitamura writes with forceful, direct prose that makes for a bracing read and leaves the reader mesmerised

Katie Kitamura is among the most briliant and profound writers at work today

Katie Kitamura is a revelatory interpreter of the human heart, in all its brilliance and obscurity

Katie Kitamura’s most recent novel is Intimacies. One of the New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2021, it was longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and was a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. It was also one of Barack Obama’s favourite books of 2021. Her work has been translated into 21 languages and is being adapted for film and television. She is a recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature, as well as fellowships from the Lannan, Santa Maddalena and Jan Michalski foundations. Kitamura has written for publications including the New York Times Book Review, the Guardian, Granta, frieze, and others. She teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.

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

Katie Kitamura

Intimacies

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