Audition

By: Katie Kitamura

Narrated by: Traci Kato-Kiriyama

Brought to you by Penguin.

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025**
**LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2026**

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 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

Critic reviews

Kitamura’s great talent is describing the minutiae of human connections, how in the course of seconds an interaction can provoke sympathy, then irritation, followed by confusion. She can turn a single exchange into a symphony of implications

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

Katie Kitamura’s latest novel, Audition, is slick, sharp, strange and singular. I love her work; she’s a writer who can conjure intrigue from the scantest detail, and you’ll gulp this novel down in one in-breath (Samantha Harvey, Booker Prize-winning author of ORBITAL)

Kitamura's novels are short, sharp and deadly. I’m not sure there’s anyone better writing in America today (Alex Preston)

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

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

A quiet novel about the ways we hide our true selves from others – and ourselves (Barack Obama)

Kitamura is always worth reading

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

A daring, riddling novel . . . A literary hall of mirrors that explores the deepest questions about performance, identity and how we relate to each other

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.