Audition
A Novel
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- USD 11.99
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- USD 11.99
Publisher Description
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, KIRKUS, SHELF AWARENESS AND MORE!
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR FICTION
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 BOOKER PRIZE
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
In this novel from Katie Kitamura, a woman deals with a world that’s changing all around her—but who is doing the changing? A successful and well-respected actress, in rehearsals for a new play, is having lunch with a handsome, mysterious man young enough to be her son. While he’s certain they’re related, she insists it’s impossible. When her husband stops by, she wonders what he’ll make of the situation. In the novel’s second half, everything has subtly changed—the play is a success, but the actress is unsatisfied, while the young man is an assistant to the director and is treated as her son. Kitamura’s story is fascinating and rich in narrative detail; even at its most mysterious it draws in the reader and asks compelling questions about who we are to ourselves and others around us. It’s smart, exciting, and challenging work.
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.
