Audition

De: Katie Kitamura

Narrado por: Traci Kato-Kiriyama

Brought to you by Penguin.

**LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025**

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

Reseñas de la Crítica

'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)

'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)

'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' (Lauren Groff)

'Sublime writing from one word to the next, from the first word to the last' (Roxane Gay)

Fantasy, flashback, Xavier's monologue play, parallel universe or Möbius strip situation?

Audition is open to a few interpretations. The novel is something different. The themes are parenthood, how your loved ones can feel like strangers, marriage and acting / performance. The structure keeps you guessing. (Is the narrator even reliable?)

The performance of the reader of the story on Audible left me cold: the reader's voice sounded computer-generated most of the time.