Audition
Katie Kitamura's 2025 novel centers on an actress in New York and a mysterious young man whose connection to her is never fully settled. The book splits into two halves that present competing versions of the same relationships, so that what seemed true in the first part is destabilized in the second. Kitamura writes in spare, precise prose and is interested in performance, in the roles people play in their own lives, and in how identity can feel scripted. The story explores marriage, motherhood, and the slipperiness of truth without giving easy answers. Like her earlier work, the novel rewards close attention and leaves much for the reader to interpret. It is a short, controlled book that uses the language of theater to question how well anyone can know the people closest to them.
What you might want to know about Audition
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
An actress in New York meets a young man who may or may not be her son, in a novel that keeps shifting the ground under the reader.
Kitamura structures the novel in two parts that offer competing versions of the same relationships, deliberately leaving the truth unresolved for the reader to weigh.
Yes. Like her novel Intimacies, it uses spare prose and an unsettled narrator to explore identity, ambiguity, and the roles people perform.
Audition was written by Katie Kitamura, published in 2025 by Vintage Publishing.
Audition is 208 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Audition takes most readers 3 to 5 hours to finish.
Audition is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
