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Intimacies
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Traci Kato-Kiriyama
- Length: 5 hrs and 26 mins
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Publisher's Summary
A New York Times Top 10 Book of 2021
Longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award in Fiction
One of Barack Obama’s Favorite 2021 Reads
An Instant National Best Seller
A Best Book of 2021 from Washington Post, Vogue, Time, Oprah Daily, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Atlantic, Kirkus and Entertainment Weekly
“Intimacies is a haunting, precise, and morally astute novel that reads like a psychological thriller…. Katie Kitamura is a wonder.” (Dana Spiotta, author of Wayward and Eat the Document)
“One of the best novels I’ve read in 2021.” (Dwight Garner, The New York Times)
A novel from the author of A Separation, an electrifying story about a woman caught between many truths.
An interpreter has come to The Hague to escape New York and work at the International Court. A woman of many languages and identities, she is looking for a place to finally call home.
She's drawn into simmering personal dramas: Her lover, Adriaan, is separated from his wife but still entangled in his marriage. Her friend Jana witnesses a seemingly random act of violence, a crime the interpreter becomes increasingly obsessed with as she befriends the victim's sister. And she's pulled into an explosive political controversy when she’s asked to interpret for a former president accused of war crimes.
A woman of quiet passion, she confronts power, love, and violence, both in her personal intimacies and in her work at the Court. She is soon pushed to the precipice, where betrayal and heartbreak threaten to overwhelm her, forcing her to decide what she wants from her life.
Critic Reviews
“[C]ooly written and casts a spell.... One of Kitamura’s gifts…is to inject every scene with a pinprick of dread.... One of the best novels I’ve read in 2021.... A taut, moody novel that moves purposefully between worlds.” (Dwight Garner, New York Times)
“[I]ntense, unsettling...Intimacies is very much a story that seems to be something familiar but soon morphs into something disorientingly strange.... [W]ith her Jamesian attention to the slightest movement of bodies and words, Kitamura keeps Intimacies rooted to the ordinary domestic experiences of her narrator, her petty jealousies, her passing suspicions. The effect is a kind of emotional intensity that’s gripping because it feels increasingly unsustainable. Who could endure that raw-nerve sensitivity to the power of language to love, to deceive, to promise, to kill? Kitamura pulls us through a rising panic of hyper-awareness until the story’s fever finally breaks with a note of hope and relief. But that can’t quell the novel’s reverberations, which expose something incomprehensible about the moral dimensions of modern life." (Ron Charles, Washington Post)
“Katie Kitamura’s fourth novel spins a taut web of dread from the start.... In cool, spare prose, Kitamura asks the book’s animating query: How should you go about your little life in a world where horrible things are happening?” (Stephanie Hayes, The Atlantic)
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What listeners say about Intimacies
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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Performance
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- "janpetrow"
- 07-23-21
A Serious Book
This is an extremely tight and intelligent book. After reading endless novels in order to escape the dark and chaotic mess that we find ourselves in this country, Kitamura’s beautifully economical writing has been for me a return to how effective great writing can be. The narration is pitch perfect, as is the book itself.
22 people found this helpful
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- R. Rodriguez
- 07-23-21
Prose of words, spare, a guide to a reader
I am finding more and more as I listen a relief that the writer includes my collaboration. Just enough, a spareness to the narrative that permits the reader to fill in the gaps in the story. Like a path and destination discovered by me instead of services of the Map. The comparisons we make with our own lives are parts of our duty as a reader, but in this case a blending occurred that was at once disturbing and a fulfillment. I am grateful. Yes. Grateful.
17 people found this helpful
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- Kindle Customer
- 08-07-21
Refreshingly smart novel
Not dumbed down at all. Surprisingly prescient. I definitely have to read more by Katie Kitamura.
9 people found this helpful
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- Teresa
- 12-23-21
Ridiculous story.
This book was highly recommended by the WSJ so I gave it a try. The narration was pretty good, a little flat, but fitting of the main character.
Half way into the story, I wondered if this book was just going to be about this dull main character, so I kept listening to find out. About 2/3 of the way in I started to think the story was actually going somewhere. The dull main character seemed to be involved in something interesting.
I had to look to see for myself if there was an additional chapter remaining at the end because I could not believe that the entire story was about nothing more than the dull main character.
A huge disappointment.
4 people found this helpful
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- Naples Golfer
- 08-23-21
Definitely not worth the time.
Still puzzled by the synopsis of the book. Terribly boring and anticlimactic. Wish I had stopped listening to it. Stayed with it in the hope of superb ending. Disappointing on all fronts.
4 people found this helpful
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- LC
- 12-12-21
Worst book I have listened to in ages
How this got on the top 10 NYT list indicates it is time to get new book reviewers. It was filled with cliches - including the whole plot on the boyfriend. The sections about interpreting for a war criminal, which got a lot of press, read like the research was done from reading the newspaper. This is the first audible book I have listened to fully and then returned because I felt anyone who endured the five-plus hours should get their money back. The anger in this review comes from the great expectations that I had after listening to the NYT podcast on the best books of 2021.
3 people found this helpful
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- Perry
- 08-22-21
never really developed
This seemed to be developing into an interesting story. Unfortunately, it just never happened. It's a shame, because the premise had such good promise.
3 people found this helpful
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- desiree northend
- 08-31-21
Story doesn’t go anywhere
I so wanted to enjoy this book. There is great detail in the story but it doesn’t go anywhere. The main character comes across as dull and boring. Nothing really happens—there is a build up to something—then nothing. I was very disappointed. The narrator delivers in a very monotone voice that drones on and on.
2 people found this helpful
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Emotionless and boring
The premis of this book is incredibly boring. There is really no story line. Or perhaps, it's the fact that the narrator is horrible. Emotionless. No inflection to her voice. It's like she is just reading the words. Don't bother.
1 person found this helpful
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- Debbie Garrett
- 09-16-21
Bad
The worst audible I’ve listened to. I can’t even return it. I wish I would have read other reviews.
1 person found this helpful
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Story
Amani is hooked on a mystery - a poem on airmail paper that slips out of one of her father’s books. It seems to have been written by her grandmother, a refugee who arrived in Jordan during the First World War. Soon the perfect occasion to investigate arises: Her uncle Hafez, an advisor to the king of Jordan, invites her father to celebrate the king’s 60th birthday - and to fence with the king, as in their youth. Her father has avoided returning to his homeland for decades, but Amani persuades him to come with her.
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A Fairytale For Adults
- By J. J. Luke on 07-15-22
By: Diana Abu-Jaber
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A Separation
- A Novel
- By: Katie Kitamura
- Narrated by: Katherine Waterston
- Length: 6 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A young woman has agreed with her faithless husband: It's time for them to separate. For the moment it's a private matter, a secret between the two of them. As she begins her new life, she gets word that Christopher has gone missing in a remote region in the rugged south of Greece; she reluctantly agrees to go look for him, still keeping their split to herself. In her heart she's not even sure if she wants to find him.
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Not a Thriller, but Still Great
- By Michael - Audible Editor on 02-09-17
By: Katie Kitamura
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The Longshot
- A Novel
- By: Katie Kitamura
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall
- Length: 4 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Four years after Rivera knocked Cal from dominance in the sport of mixed martial arts, Cal's coach has set up a rematch. Knowing he's going to face Rivera again, Cal gets his focus and energy back. But Rivera has never lost a fight, and in the final days before the match, both Cal and his coach secretly begin to have doubts. In taut, rhythmic language, Katie Kitamura renders the urgency, discipline, and mutual affection of athlete and coach with depth and subtlety.
By: Katie Kitamura
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How Beautiful We Were
- A Novel
- By: Imbolo Mbue
- Narrated by: Prentice Onayemi, Janina Edwards, Dion Graham, and others
- Length: 14 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
We should have known the end was near. So begins Imbolo Mbue’s powerful second novel, How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells of a people living in fear amid environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of cleanup and financial reparations to the villagers are made - and ignored. The country’s government, led by a brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interests.
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powerful story, meh narration
- By Benjamin W. Adams on 04-04-21
By: Imbolo Mbue
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When We Cease to Understand the World
- By: Benjamin Labatut, Adrian West - translator
- Narrated by: Adam Barr
- Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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When We Cease to Understand the World is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction. Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger - these are some of the luminaries into whose troubled lives Benjamín Labatut thrusts the listener, showing us how they grappled with the most profound questions of existence.
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the true heir w.g. sebald
- By Thomas on 12-23-21
By: Benjamin Labatut, and others
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No One Is Talking About This
- A Novel
- By: Patricia Lockwood
- Narrated by: Kristen Sieh
- Length: 4 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
As this urgent, genre-defying book opens, a woman who has recently been elevated to prominence for her social media posts travels around the world to meet her adoring fans. She is overwhelmed by navigating the new language and etiquette of what she terms "the portal," where she grapples with an unshakable conviction that a vast chorus of voices is now dictating her thoughts. When existential threats--from climate change and economic precariousness to the rise of an unnamed dictator and an epidemic of loneliness--begin to loom, she posts her way deeper into the portal's void.
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Funny, moving, glad to have read it
- By Terra on 05-26-21
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Fencing with the King
- A Novel
- By: Diana Abu-Jaber
- Narrated by: Rasha Zamamiri
- Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Amani is hooked on a mystery - a poem on airmail paper that slips out of one of her father’s books. It seems to have been written by her grandmother, a refugee who arrived in Jordan during the First World War. Soon the perfect occasion to investigate arises: Her uncle Hafez, an advisor to the king of Jordan, invites her father to celebrate the king’s 60th birthday - and to fence with the king, as in their youth. Her father has avoided returning to his homeland for decades, but Amani persuades him to come with her.
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A Fairytale For Adults
- By J. J. Luke on 07-15-22
By: Diana Abu-Jaber
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Wayward
- A Novel
- By: Dana Spiotta
- Narrated by: Susan Bennett
- Length: 9 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Samantha Raymond's life has begun to come apart: her mother is ill, her teenage daughter is increasingly remote, and at fifty-two she finds herself staring into "the Mids" - that hour of supreme wakefulness between three and four in the morning in which women of a certain age suddenly find themselves contemplating motherhood, mortality, and, in this case, the state of our unraveling nation.
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Pathetic story -- Save your credit
- By Mary D on 07-10-21
By: Dana Spiotta
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Red Pill
- A Novel
- By: Hari Kunzru
- Narrated by: Hari Kunzru
- Length: 8 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
After receiving a prestigious writing fellowship in Germany, the narrator of Red Pill arrives in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee and struggles to accomplish anything at all. Instead of working on the book he has proposed to write, he takes long walks and binge-watches Blue Lives - a violent cop show that becomes weirdly compelling in its bleak, Darwinian view of life - and soon begins to wonder if his writing has any value at all.
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Paranoia justified
- By Daved Baker on 11-05-20
By: Hari Kunzru
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Harry Sylvester Bird
- By: Chinelo Okparanta
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 9 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Harry Sylvester Bird grows up in Edward, Pennsylvania, with his parents, Wayne and Chevy, whom he greatly dislikes. They’re racist, xenophobic, financially incompetent, and they have quite a few secrets of their own. To Harry, they represent everything wrong with this country. And his small town isn’t any better. He witnesses racial profiling, graffitied swastikas, and White Power signs on his walk home from school. He can’t wait until he’s old enough to leave. When he finally is, he moves straight to New York City, where he feels he can finally live out his true inner self.
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Written for the “unwoke”
- By Nada on 07-25-22
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Mercy Street
- A Novel
- By: Jennifer Haigh
- Narrated by: Stacey Glemboski
- Length: 10 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
For almost a decade, Claudia has counseled patients at Mercy Street, a clinic in the heart of the city. The work is consuming, the unending dramas of women in crisis. For its patients, Mercy Street offers more than health care; for many, it is a second chance.
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Unbearable
- By Laurie B on 03-05-22
By: Jennifer Haigh
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H.M. Pulham, Esquire
- A Novel
- By: John P. Marquand
- Narrated by: P. J. Ochlan
- Length: 15 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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A Harvard reunion prompts a Boston Brahmin’s search for meaning in this comedy of manners by the number-one New York Times best-selling author of Point of No Return.
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Satire or Commentary
- By Amazon Customer on 06-23-21
By: John P. Marquand
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Flux
- A Novel
- By: Jinwoo Chong
- Narrated by: David Lee Huynh
- Length: 10 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Four days before Christmas, eight-year-old Bo loses his mother in a tragic accident, twenty-eight-year-old Brandon loses his job after a hostile takeover of his big-media employer, and forty-eight-year-old Blue, a key witness in a criminal trial against an infamous now-defunct tech startup, struggles to reconnect with his family. So begins Jinwoo Chong's dazzling time-bending debut that blends elements of neo-noir and speculative fiction as the lives of Bo, Brandon, and Blue begin to intersect, uncovering a network of secrets and an experimental technology that threatens to upend life itself.
By: Jinwoo Chong
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The Promise
- By: Damon Galgut
- Narrated by: Peter Noble
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Haunted by an unmet promise, the Swart family loses touch after the death of their matriarch. Adrift, the lives of the three siblings move separately through the uncharted waters of South Africa; Anton, the golden boy who bitterly resents his life’s unfulfilled potential; Astrid, whose beauty is her power; and the youngest, Amor, whose life is shaped by a nebulous feeling of guilt.
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Excellent novel
- By ALG on 11-09-21
By: Damon Galgut
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The Life of the Mind
- A Novel
- By: Christine Smallwood
- Narrated by: Allyson Ryan
- Length: 7 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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As an adjunct professor of English in New York City with little hope of finding a permanent position, Dorothy feels “like a janitor in the temple who continued to sweep because she had nowhere else to be but who had lost her belief in the essential sanctity of the enterprise”. No one but her boyfriend knows that she’s just had a miscarriage - not her mother, her best friend, or her therapists (Dorothy has two of them). She wasn’t even sure she wanted to be a mother. So why does Dorothy feel like a failure?
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False promo on Fresh Air provoked me to waste my money on this book.
- By Antiquarian Photographer on 03-24-21