Intimacies - by Katie Kitamura (Paperback)

AN INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER

A BEST BOOK OF 2021 FROM Washington Post, Vogue, Time, Oprah Daily, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Atlantic, Kirkus and Entertainment Weekly

"Intimacies is a haunting, precise, and morally astute novel that reads like a psychological thriller.... Katie Kitamura is a wonder." --Dana Spiotta, author of Wayward and Eat the Document

"One of the best novels I've read in 2021." - Dwight Garner, The New York Times

A novel from the author of A Separation, an electrifying story about a woman caught between many truths.

An interpreter has come to The Hague to escape New York and work at the International Court. A woman of many languages and identities, she is looking for a place to finally call home.

She's drawn into simmering personal dramas: her lover, Adriaan, is separated from his wife but still entangled in his marriage. Her friend Jana witnesses a seemingly random act of violence, a crime the interpreter becomes increasingly obsessed with as she befriends the victim's sister. And she's pulled into an explosive political controversy when she's asked to interpret for a former president accused of war crimes.

A woman of quiet passion, she confronts power, love, and violence, both in her personal intimacies and in her work at the Court. She is soon pushed to the precipice, where betrayal and heartbreak threaten to overwhelm her, forcing her to decide what she wants from her life.

Review Quotes

"Cooly written and casts a spell... One of Kitamura's gifts... is to inject every scene with a pinprick of dread.... One of the best novels I've read in 2021... A taut, moody novel that moves purposefully between worlds." --Dwight Garner, New York Times

"Intense, unsettling... Intimacies is very much a story that seems to be something familiar but soon morphs into something disorientingly strange....Kitamura pulls us through a rising panic of hyper-awareness until the story's fever finally breaks with a note of hope and relief. But that can't quell the novel's reverberations, which expose something incomprehensible about the moral dimensions of modern life." --Ron Charles, Washington Post

"Intimacies is both sleekly gorgeous -- those sentences -- and psychologically unnerving. She's an absolutely brilliant writer." --Julie Otsuka, New York Times Book Review

"A master of cool disquiet... Kitamura writes with forceful, direct prose that makes for a bracing read and leaves the reader mesmerized." --Lauren Mechling, Vogue

"[A] thriller of a novel.... In exploring how one's proximity to power and violence can hold endless repercussions, Kitamura interrogates how our intimacies can change the course of our lives." --Time

"Kitamura's prose elegantly breaks grammatical convention... this style mirrors the book's concern with the bleeding lines between intimacies -- especially between the sincere and the coercive -- while Kitamura's immense talent smooths the seams.... Kitamura's work also contains a keen understanding of human behavior, one that reaches far beyond the pages of this brief and arresting book; she travels to places that ordinary writers cannot go." --Catherine Lacey, The New York Times Book Review

"[A] gorgeous, destabilizing meditation on the power differentials built into language and the gradual distortions of our emotional allegiances." --Raven Leilani, Vulture

"An amazing book, beautiful and captivating'" --Elif Shafak

"In spare and elegant prose, Kitamura limns her unnamed protagonist's search for home and gifts us a powerful, beautiful book." --Chika Unigwe

"I love how Katie Kitamura can channel a mind." --Ruth Ozeki, Observer UK, Best Books of the Year)

"A piercing meditation on the way language moderates our perception of violence . . . About once every two pages, Kitamura writes a phrase that feels like a key turning inside your body." --Jenny Singer, Glamour

"Powerful, masterful.... One might call Kitamura one of the most talented thriller writers who doesn't write thrillers, for her novels are tinged with menace and threat and dark alleys that seem primed for acts of violence. And yet, really, the artistry . . . . lies in the delicate ways in which characters continue on, persevere slightly better or slightly worse, and survive." --Chris Bollen, Interview Magazine

"[T]he book vibrates with tension. . . Kitamura's prose is responsible for this effect -- she writes like a concert violinist, with clarity and control and a sustained, uneasy high pitch." --Steph Cha, Los Angeles Times

"Kitamura blends the personal and political in spare, elegant, inimitable prose. A standout novel, like nothing I've read before." --Kathryn Ma, San Francisco Chronicle

"[Intimacies] spins a taut web of dread from the start. . . In cool, spare prose, Kitamura asks the book's animating query: How should you go about your little life in a world where horrible things are happening?" --Stephanie Hayes, The Atlantic

"In crystalline prose, Kitamura probes the labyrinths of language and the riddles of our humanity . . . Intimacies is a judicious, cerebral novel, but Kitamura seasons it with dashes of glamor. . . . This slim, graceful novel punches above its weight as Kitamura explores tragedy on an epic scale, reckoning with the ways we deceive each other and ourselves." --Hamilton Cain, Oprah Daily

"Katie Kitamura dazzles us again. . . Her ability to impart vivacious detail with sparse and direct prose is a testament to her talent, and the moments that she is able to create between characters and places are memorable and beautiful." --Buzzfeed

"A strange and mesmerizing tale about language, understanding, and the role of strangers in our most intimate moments." --Bookriot

"[A] novel that carries enormous moral weight, attending to themes of alienation, violence, and love, with every page written in the most taut, gripping prose. It will haunt your dreams long after you've turned down the last page." --Tahmima Anam, E! Online

"Spare, exacting prose . . . with powerful questions about morality, responsibility, and how we tell stories." - Shondaland

"There's a restrained intensity to Katie Kitamura's prose. . . It's that willingness to keep readers at an intriguing distance before revealing the messy emotions driving it all." --A.V. Club

"This is the kind of book that quickens the pulse not because of logic-defying plot twists, but rather because of how surgically precise it is in revealing how our emotional realities take on epic dimensions in our own minds, and often threaten our stability in the precise ways that things of global import rarely do." --Refinery29

"Intimacies is a haunting, precise, and morally astute novel that reads like a psychological thriller. It expertly and concisely delves into the paradoxes of language--how language can obscure our own complicity, and how language can enable us to escape our own delusions. Katie Kitamura is a wonder; her work is striking, stylish, and fully realized." --Dana Spiotta, author of Innocents and Others and Eat the Document

"Gripping and elegant. No one's work simmers with emotional complexity like Katie Kitamura's." --Mira Jacob, author of Good Talk

"A novel about the ruthlessness of power, the check of virtue, and the purportedly neutral bureaucracy meant to mediate between them. Katie Kitamura is among the most brilliant and profound writers at work today; she reminds me how high the moral stakes of fiction can be." --Garth Greenwell, author of Small Rain

"Katie Kitamura writes about being an outsider like no other author. Quiet moments are charged with tension and power. In short, the book is remarkable - beautifully written and intelligent." --Avni Doshi, author of Burnt Sugar

"Intimacies is a perfect novel--taut and seductive. Kitamura has made the existential thriller all her own, and she effortlessly negotiates the personal and the geopolitical with a complex moral nuance. Simply stunning." --Brandon Taylor, author of Minor Black Figures

"Saturated with enigmatic longing, Intimacies peels back the layers of sympathy, antipathy, and morality that both connect and divide us from others, unearthing something precious beneath. Katie Kitamura is a revelatory interpreter of the human heart, in all its brilliance and obscurity." --Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun

"Katie Kitamura's voice -- spare, electric, evocative -- could take me anywhere. Especially into this landscape of global wanderers, uprooted women, fragmented souls. Intimacies is a singular pleasure -- a dangerous, seductive, dagger of a novel." --Danzy Senna, author of Colored Television

"Katie Kitamura's beautifully wrought novel is tense and suspenseful, a mystery about human choices. From its protagonist's work as an interpreter at the Hague, from crimes against humanity, to friendship and a love affair, the interpreter can't escape questions of judgment and justice. She balances tenuously on an ethical scale, while interpretation itself is brilliantly employed as the faulty method that subsumes all communication. Like a work by Graham Greene, INTIMACIES kept me in its tight grip." --Lynne Tillman, author of Men and Apparitions

"Like her protagonist, Kitamura... is a master of precisely evocative language. . . at once forthright and mysterious, [Intimacies is] a piercing and propulsive meditation on closeness of many sorts." --Booklist (STARRED review)

"[Intimacies] packs a controlled but considerable wallop, all the more pleasurable for its nuance. This psychological tone poem is a barbed and splendid meditation on peril." --Kirkus (STARRED review)

About the Author