Audition: A Novel by Katie Kitamura

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.

REVIEWS

“Prose so acrobatic it lands before a reader realizes it has leapt … You will reel, you will stagger, but you will not be able to look away from the stage.”—The Chicago Review of Books

“A tightly wound family drama that reads like a psychological thriller."—NPR

"Kitamura’s novels have the propulsive quality of the genres she borrows from—the murder mystery, the courtroom drama—even though they are largely concerned with the distance between characters and the fine mesh of misapprehensions that constitutes most relationships...Audition continues that shift away from the idea of the public sphere as a place where people can understand themselves. There’s a sense that the greatest revelations take place deep within the private life—in places so buried that they can be accessed only through secrecy, delusion, or pretense."
—New York Review of Books

PRODUCT DETAILS
Paperback
Publisher: Riverhead Books
ISBN: 978-0593852323
Pages: 208