Katie Kitamura

ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR FINALIST FOR THE 2025 BOOKER PRIZE INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER “A tightly wound family drama that reads like a psychological thriller."—NPR “Bold, stark, genre-bending, Audition will haunt your dreams.”—The Boston Globe 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.

A Novel

Audition

Amelia

It was that here, the gap between my private and performed selves collapsed, and for the briefest of moments there was only a single, unified self. Did this happen only in those few minutes on that stage and nowhere else? It felt that way. Although every beat of the scene was tightly scripted, I felt as if I had an infinite amount of time, I moved at my leisure. And while I hit my marks and cues, never deviating from the script, I was not in control of what took place, there was an alchemical process by which the scene unfolded, mysterious even to me and Max. In those moments,I was in communion with something, some force that was larger than myself and the scope of my ordinary life.

For so many years there had been the tacit understanding that I contained the threat to the marriage, that it was housed inside me. And for all those years I had tamped down every impulse to stray, I had lived inside a straitjacket of my own devising, and I had remained true. But in the end, he was the first to tire of the marriage, he was the first to look outside, to open the door and taste the fresh and free air. He was the first, and he was always bound to be the first, because of course I needed him, I needed Tomas, much more than he needed me, and this had always been the case, whether I was able to admit it or not. It was him, and it was always going to be him.

I stand on the stage. I look out into the audience, whichis full, the kind of house that Xavier must have dreamed of possibly from the very start. Xavier, whose ambition has the depth and power of my own. It is the kind of house I myself wanted in the early days of my career, when the au- dience and its recognition was all I seemed to seek. Always to be seen, in those days it was alnost an end in itselt, be- cause it was in being seen that I could say for certain that I existed, that my limbs were real as I touched them, that my being was intact as it peered out into the world. A stay against the turbulence within methat was, perhapS, purpose of all this. he

katie h.

They would talk about the terrible evening they had spent in my company. Perhaps they would even mock me a little, my auteur, my arrogance, I could see it already. I was holding the stem of my wine glass in my fingers, tapping the ball of it restlessly, and now I carefully knocked the glass so that a stain blossomed on the tablecloth and the others startled and pushed back their chairs.

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