Audition
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025
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4.3 • 12 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025**
A GUARDIAN, INDEPENDENT and NEW STATESMAN Book of the Year
'Slick, sharp, strange and singular . . . You’ll gulp this novel down in one in-breath' SAMANTHA HARVEY, Booker Prize-winning author of Orbital
'A lightning bolt of a novel' FINANCIAL TIMES
'I’m not sure there’s anyone better writing in America today' ALEX PRESTON, Observer
One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. An exhilarating, destabilising 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kitamura (Intimacies) serves up a taut and alluring novel about a mysterious relationship between a middle-aged woman and a young man. The unnamed narrator, a well-known theater actor, meets Xavier at a restaurant in New York City. Their first meeting took place two weeks earlier, and the woman doles out sparse and subtle clues in her narration, comparing her lunch with Xavier, now a college student, to one she had with her father in Paris. Kitamura keeps the reader guessing as to whether the characters are mother and son, lovers, or something else. Shortly after the lunch, Xavier becomes more involved in the narrator's life, working as an assistant for the director of a play in which the narrator stars. She reflects on her ambivalence toward motherhood and the long-ago miscarriage she had with her husband, Tomas, after which she had a series of affairs. About Xavier, the narrator is secretive not only with the reader but with Tomas, and his suspicion that they're having an affair threatens their marriage. In the novel's second half, Kitamura further complicates the narrator and Xavier's murky relationship. Throughout, she succeeds in creating a complex and engrossing portrayal of her characters' blurry boundaries. Readers won't be able to put this down.
Customer Reviews
I failed the audition
The author is Japanese-American and lives in London with her husband, British novelist Hari Kunzru.
Middle-aged female actor successful on both stage and screen is rehearsing a new play in NYC. Young attractive make lobs up. She asks him to lunch. Her stay at home writer hubby dines out for a change and sees her. Having dessert, not in flagrante or anything.
The play she is rehearsing is two acts. In best post-modern fashion, the book is made up of two parts. The first part builds tension towards a seemingly inevitable event (guess what) that never happens and is not even alluded to in the second part. There is, however, considerable highly literate rumination on the theatre, race, motherhood and whatever the last 50 pages were about.
Ms K writes beautifully and is worth reading for her prose alone. If you are new to her work, I recommend her previous novel Intimacies (2021), which also had a plot, one recognisable as such to me at least.