AUDITION

April 2025. Riverhead Books (USA) and Fern Press (UK).

Preorder here, here and here.
In the UK, preorder here.

Most Anticipated of 2025: Washington Post, Vogue, Time, New York Magazine, Rolling Stone, Vulture, Marie Claire, BBC, Guardian, Financial Times, Observer (UK), Evening Standard, Electric Lit, Lit Hub, Publishers Weekly, Looper, Sydney Morning Herald, B&N Reads, Today.com.

International editions forthcoming from Hanser (Germany), Stock (France), Bollati Boringhieri (Italy), Sexto Piso (Spain), Pelikanen (Norway), One More Page (Ukraine).

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.

Early Praise:

“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

"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 MARS ROOM and THE FLAMETHROWERS

“A strange and unnerving tale about love and art. Kitamura’s novels are short, sharp and deadly. I’m not sure there’s anyone better writing in America today.” —Alex Preston, Observer (UK)

“This elegant knife of a story begins at a mundane restaurant in Manhattan's financial district … So much glints below the surface in her purring, pared-down sentences. In this searing, chilly, and psychologically profound story lies insight into some harrowing human questions.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred)

"Kitamura (Intimacies) serves up a taut and alluring novel about a mysterious relationship between a middle-aged woman and a young man … Throughout, she succeeds in creating a complex and engrossing portrayal of her characters’ blurry boundaries. Readers won’t be able to put this down.” — Publishers Weekly (starred)