Reading guide: Audition by Katie Kitamura

An exhilarating, destabilising novel that asks whether we ever really know the people we love

Whether you’re new to Audition or have read it and would like to explore it more deeply, here is our comprehensive guide, featuring insights from critics, our judges and the book’s author, as well as discussion points and suggestions for further reading.

Written by Emily Facoory

Published September 23, 2025

Synopsis

Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, and 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.

Audition was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025.

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Main characters

Narrator

The unnamed narrator is an accomplished actress who is in the middle of rehearsals for a play. She struggles to inhabit her character in the first part of the novel but enjoys professional success in the second part. Throughout the novel she reflects on marriage, motherhood, and regret.

Xavier

Xavier is an attractive young man who, in the first part of the novel, believes he is the narrator’s son. He becomes the assistant to the director of the play in which the narrator is starring. As the novel progresses, his relationship with the narrator and her husband Tomas undergoes a significant change.

Tomas

Tomas is the narrator’s husband, who works as an art critic. In the first part of the book he is emotionally distant and avoids confrontation, while also secretly desiring to have a child. His personality changes as the story goes on, with the dynamics shifting within the couple’s relationship.

About the author

Katie Kitamura is an American novelist, journalist and art critic, born in Sacramento, California. Kitamura graduated from Princeton University in New Jersey and earned a PhD in American literature from the London Consortium.

She is the author of five novels. Intimacies was selected as one of the New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2021, was longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and was a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. It was also one of Barack Obama’s favourite books of 2021.

Her work has been translated into over 20 languages and is being adapted for film and television. She is a recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature, as well as fellowships from the Lannan, Santa Maddalena and Jan Michalski foundations. Kitamura has written for publications including the New York Times Book Review, the Guardian, Granta, frieze, and others, and teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.

Katie Kitamura in a black top looking at the camera slightly smiling — Katie Kitamura
*© David Surowiecki*

What the judges said

‘Audition is a brilliantly tense, taut novel that sees a woman have her life turned inside-out. What’s real? What’s not? This is a book that makes existential detectives of us all.

‘This is a very controlled performance of a book that intentionally leaves a lot open to interpretation. We think readers will love finding others who’ve read it and talking to them about what it all might mean.’

What the critics said

Arin Keeble, Financial Times

‘In her depictions of how an unexpected turn of phrase, awkward silence, unbidden distraction or shift in body language can change the weather in a room, Kitamura is unparalleled.’

Joumana Khatib, New York Times

‘It’s her most thrilling examination yet of the deceit inherent in human connection… Few writers have nailed the interpersonal thriller better than Kitamura.’ 

Ellen Wiles, Times Literary Supplement

‘Kitamura’s prose is remarkable for its minimalist quality, characterized by brief, declaratory observations and acute psychological insights… While rich in ideas, Audition fails to match the drama of Kitamura’s previous novel, Intimacies (2021) … But Audition is more formally daring, and the writing is as distinctive as ever in its concision and intelligence.’

Priscilla Gilman, The Boston Globe

‘A radically disquieting and eerily unnerving meditation on the nature of identity and the construction of selfhood. It insistently raises questions about the things we most take for granted … Kitamura gets behind the masks of common vision and produces fiction of visionary impact. Bold, stark, genre-bending, Audition will haunt your dreams.’

Justin Taylor, The Washington Post

‘The first time I read Audition, I found it a deftly crafted, slow-burn psychological thriller full of sly metafictional reflections on the nature of storytelling and identity, on just how much rehearsal, interpretation and collaboration it takes to produce these performances we so blithely call our lives … Any definitive “truth” would only diminish the deeper and more mysterious truths of Kitamura’s resolute irresolution.’

What the author said

‘The starting point for Audition was a desire to write about the long process through which children must necessarily grow up to become strangers to their own parents. I wanted to write about how certain universal experiences – of love, of motherhood – can sometimes feel like two mutually exclusive things at the same time. But rather than writing about that contradiction, I wanted to write it directly – to embed it in the structure of the novel. Reading the book requires holding two separate versions of events in your head at the same time. It’s either/or, and also and. As a culture, we’re becoming quite bad at holding a contradiction in our heads. And yet we live in a time of profound and increasing cognitive dissonance.’

Read the full interview

‘I loved writing this book. It feels strange to say that, because on the one hand it’s probably irrelevant to the reader, whether or not the writer enjoyed writing the book they’re reading. But I loved not only the world of the novel, but also the construction of it. I felt that I was taking risks, of a kind that I hadn’t taken before, and that was exhilarating.’

Read the full interview

Questions and discussion points

The novel is split into two distinct halves, with Part Two exploring a kind of parallel universe to the world set up in Part One. In an interview with the Booker Prizes, Katie Kitamura explained, ‘Reading the book requires holding two separate versions of events in your head at the same time. It’s either/or, and also and’. What did you think of the novel’s contradicting storylines? Was it possible to hold dissonant versions of events in your head?

In the first part of the book, the narrator doesn’t have children, while in the second part, she is a mother. What aspects of her personality did you recognise had changed between these two identities?

Speaking with Interview Magazine, Kitamura said, ‘With this book in particular, I wanted to invite the reader to step inside and to create the book with me. It was important to create footholds, points of stability and shared reference, so that the book had the foundation from which multiple variations or interpretations could grow.’ Do you think Kitamura achieved this with Audition?

In the same interview, Kitamura said that she wanted the book to be ‘a little bit like a David Lynch film, in the sense that the effect is the effect.’ What do you think she meant by that? What aspects of David Lynch’s film work do you think she successfully replicated?

In the first part of the story, the narrator can’t seem to access the character she is portraying on stage to its full extent. Kitamura doesn’t reveal much about the play beyond the general idea that it contains grief and the idea of transformation. Why do you think she doesn’t explain the full context of the play, considering it’s a major part of the storyline across the two sections of the book?

In the first part of the book, the play is called ‘The Opposite Shore’, while in the second part, it’s called ‘Rivers’. Why do you think Kitamura changed the play’s title and what do you think these two different names mean?

The idea of performance is a major theme in the book, both within the narrator’s professional life as an actor and her personal life with her family and how she performs her domestic duties. The narrator states that, ‘I looked across at Tomas and I knew he was not convinced, that some part of him wished to stay inside the performance, inside the fantasy, I could see the thought moving through his head and nearly settling, what was a family if not a shared delusion, a mutual construction?’ What do you think she meant by that?

In the Chicago Review of Books, Dez Deshaies describes Kitamura’s writing as ‘distinctive’, saying that her ‘prose is so acrobatic it lands before a reader realises it has leapt.’ Do you agree? What did you enjoy most about Kitamura’s writing style and what did you find challenging?

Tomas sees the narrator and Xavier together at a restaurant but doesn’t probe, beyond asking ‘You’re not cheating on me again, are you?’. The narrator can’t understand why her husband doesn’t demand an explanation or more reassurance. Why do you think Tomas reacted in the way that he did? What did you make of the relationship between the narrator and Tomas, and how it evolves between Parts One and Two?

In the second part of the book, Xavier moves in with the narrator and Tomas, who soon start to behave almost like domestic servants – buying him furniture and belongings and constantly bringing him food and drinks. Why do you think Kitamura makes the couple behave in such a subservient way and put Xavier’s desires ahead of their own?

Towards the end of the novel, the narrator says, ‘Here, it is possible to be two things at once. Not a splitting of personality or psyche, but the natural superimposition of one mind on top of another mind. In the space between them, a performance becomes possible.’ What do you think she means by this?