Audition - by Katie Kitamura (Hardcover)

About the Book

"One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. A mesmerizing Mobius strip of a novel that asks who we are to the people we love. Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She's an elegant and accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He's attractive, troubling, and 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 best. Taut, hypnotic, Audition is Katie Kitamura at her virtuosic best"--

Book Synopsis

NAMED A 2025 "ESSENTIAL READ" BY THE NEW YORKER AND A TOP 10 BOOK OF THE YEAR BY TIME MAGAZINE AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST, THE NEW YORKER, NPR, THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY, VOGUE, TIME MAGAZINE, MARIE CLAIRE, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE GUARDIAN, BOOK RIOT, ESQUIRE, THE NEW REPUBLIC, KIRKUS, SHELF AWARENESS AND MORE!

ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 BOOKER PRIZE

FINALIST FOR THE 2025 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR FICTION AND THE 2026 GOTHAM BOOK PRIZE

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2026 WOMEN'S PRIZE, THE JOYCE CAROL OATES PRIZE, AND THE CAROL SHIELDS PRIZE FOR FICTION

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.

Review Quotes

Praise for Audition

"Slick, sharp, strange and singular. I love [Kitamura's] work; she's a writer who can conjure intrigue from the scantest detail, and you'll gulp this novel down in one in-breath."
--Samantha Harvey in The Guardian

"[Kitamura's] most thrilling examination yet of the deceit inherent in human connection."
--The New York Times

"[A] taut, keenly observed take on the roles we play. . . worthy of a standing ovation."
--People

"A deftly crafted, slow-burn psychological thriller full of sly metafictional reflections on the nature of storytelling and identity."
--The Washington Post

"A short, propulsive novel that suggests that at work and in life, we are constantly trying out roles and making it up as we go along."
--Associated Press

"Prose so acrobatic it lands before a reader realizes it has leapt ... You will reel, you will stagger, but you will not be able to look away from the stage."
--The Chicago Review of Books

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

"Kitamura's novels have the propulsive quality of the genres she borrows from--the murder mystery, the courtroom drama--even though they are largely concerned with the distance between characters and the fine mesh of misapprehensions that constitutes most relationships...Audition continues that shift away from the idea of the public sphere as a place where people can understand themselves. There's a sense that the greatest revelations take place deep within the private life--in places so buried that they can be accessed only through secrecy, delusion, or pretense."
--New York Review of Books

"A glittering work of illusion and desire."
--Minneapolis Star-Tribute

"A short but sharp novel of perspectives, performances and preconceptions ... Audition is two acts about two acts. Read it and then read it again."
--Ms. Magazine

"A blisteringly incisive, coolly devastating tour de force of controlled menace.... Bold, stark, genre-bending, Audition will haunt your dreams."
--Priscilla Gilman, Boston Globe

"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 of 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

"Every utterance or gesture is freighted with subtext, and one elegantly polished sentence follows the next."
--BookPage

"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 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."
--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

About the Author

Katie Kitamura is the author of five novels, most recently Audition and Intimacies, which was named one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2021, longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and a finalist for a Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She is a recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature, fellowships from the Cullman Center and the Lannan Foundation, and many other honors. Her work has been translated into twenty-one languages. She teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.