NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2025 BY THE WASHINGTON POST, VOGUE, ROLLING STONE, NBC.COM, THE GUARDIAN, AND THE FINANCIAL TIMES
“Spare, restrained, taut, disquieting… Expertly drawn-out.”
—Washington Post
“Katie Kitamura writes with a spare, almost clinical efficiency, but that doesn’t limit the depth of her characters or the complexity of the dynamics she depicts… The strange pendulum swing from one scenario to the other catches you off guard—and isn’t that the mark of truly exciting fiction?”
—Vogue
“Kitamura’s novels are short, sharp and deadly. I’m not sure there’s anyone better writing in America today.”
—The Guardian
“Beguiling… Kitamura chooses to upend everything … as her story creeps toward a brutal climax. … Hypnotic and finely observant … sleek, provocative … a must for literary collections and for book club discussions.”
—Library Journal
“[An] elegant knife of a story. . . So much glints below the surface in [Kitamura’s] purring, pared-down sentences. . .In this searing, chilly, and psychologically profound story lies insight into some harrowing human questions.”
—Kirkus, starred review
“Kitamura serves up a taut and alluring novel…complex and engrossing…Readers won’t be able to put this down.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
"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 Flamethrowers and The Mars Room
“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
