AUDITION
April 2025. Riverhead Books (USA) and Fern Press (UK). Preorder here, here and here. In the UK, preorder here.
April Indie Next Pick
Most Anticipated: New York Times, Washington Post, Vogue, Time, New York Magazine, Rolling Stone, Vulture, Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire, Town and Country, Esquire, Ms, BBC, Guardian, Financial Times, Observer (UK), Evening Standard, Bustle, Electric Lit, Lit Hub, Publishers Weekly, Looper, Globe and Mail, 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:
“Spare, restrained, taut, disquieting … Expertly drawn out.” —Washington Post
“Katie Kitamura writes with a spare, economical efficiency, but that doesn’t limit the complexity of the characters or the dynamics she depicts. Like Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry or Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies, Audition is divided into sections with distinctly different perspectives - each ricocheting off the other to make you wonder how we assemble narrative and understand truth. The unsettling pendulum swing catches you off guard - the mark of truly exciting fiction.” —Vogue
“Katie Kitamura’s spectacular Audition explores the enigmatic relationship between a middle-aged woman and a younger man … Kitamura offers a virtuoso performance of sly agility, presented in elliptical, elegant prose. Provocatively perplexing and utterly beguiling, Audition deftly captures that play-acting magic on every page.” —Shelf Awareness
“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.” —Observer (UK)
“You won’t really know what Audition is about until you read it (and even then, you may have trouble deciding what and who to believe). A sharp exploration of the performances we put on every day.” —Marie Claire
“Kitamura writes plots that focus on existential uncertainty in prose so cold it cuts like a knife out of the freezer.” —Globe and Mail
“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
“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)