Audition by Kitamura, Katie

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY BARACK OBAMA, THE WASHINGTON POST, THE NEW YORKER, NPR, THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY, VOGUE, TIME MAGAZINE, MARIE CLAIRE, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE GUARDIAN AND MORE!

FINALIST FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE, THE JOYCE CAROL OATES PRIZE, THE GOTHAM BOOK PRIZE, AND THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR FICTION

LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE AND THE CAROL SHIELDS PRIZE FOR FICTION

INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER

"A tightly wound family drama that reads like a psychological thriller."--NPR

"Bold, stark, genre-bending, Audition will haunt your dreams."--The Boston Globe

One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. An exhilarating, destabilizing Möbius strip of a 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.

Author: Katie Kitamura
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Published: 04/07/2026
Pages: 208
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.39lbs
Size: 7.99h x 5.40w x 0.59d
ISBN: 9780593852347

About the Author
Katie Kitamura is the author of five novels, most recently Audition and Intimacies, which was named one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2021, longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and a finalist for a Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She is a recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature, fellowships from the Cullman Center and the Lannan Foundation, and many other honors. Her work has been translated into twenty-one languages. She teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.