Audition

Author Katie Kitamura
Narrator Traci Kato-Kiriyama
Publisher Random House
Publish Date 17 April 2025
Run Time 4 hours and 46 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Modern and contemporary fiction, Narrative theme: Interior life, Narrative theme: Love and relationships, Psychological thriller.

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. An exhilarating, destabilising 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.

© Katie Kitamura 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

Critics Review

Kitamura is unparalleled . . . Always engaging and thought-provoking . . . Audition is a lightning bolt of a novel

Financial Times

Kitamura's novels are short, sharp and deadly. Iu2019m not sure thereu2019s anyone better writing in America today

Observer

A literary performance of true uncanniness: one that, in a very real sense, takes on life

Guardian

Audition has powerful things to say about our present destabilised society . . . This superb, thoughtful novel resonated long after finishing

Independent

Kitamura is always worth reading

Evening Standard

Kitamura is totally in control of her prodigious gifts. Her confluence of style and ruthless intelligence is so distinctive that it feels almost like its own genre. Whether she remains in the terrain she has established or not, we are lucky to read her

New Statesman

You have never read anything like this gorgeously disquieting book. Audition challenges our preconceptions about love, art and selfhood u2013 and, magnificently, our very idea of how a novel should unfold. If all the worldu2019s a stage, Kitamura reminds us that we never stop auditioning for our parts

Hernan Diaz

Highly accomplished . . . What makes Audition distinctive is a precision, a sharpness of focus

London Review of Books

Formally daring . . . The writing is as distinctive as ever in its concision and intelligence

Times Literary Supplement

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. Sheu2019s an original, building an entire metier of her own

Rachel Kushner

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