Audition by Katie Kitamura

Shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize + Obama's Favorite Books of 2025

Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies, is all about subtle yet spectacular drama and she's back at it again in Audition, weaving us back into a hypnotic, contained world full of intricate human relations in eloquent prose. Cinematic and noir-like in style, Kitamura uses Manhattan as its stage in classic Woody Allen and Paul Auster style. Dynamic, moody, and quietly manic – a complete 180 from the insanity-driven, mid-life crisis cry for help we read in Miranda July's All Fours, yet perhaps two sides of the same coin.

Publisher synopsis:
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.

• Author: Katie Kitamura
• Pages: 197
• Release year: 2025
• Hardcover
• Published by: Riverhead (Penguin Random House)
• Printed in the USA