Audition

About this book

Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2026, shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025, a Guardian, Independent and New Statesman Book of the Year! 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. 'Slick, sharp, strange and singular.' - Samantha Harvey, Booker Prize-winning author of Orbital. 'A quiet novel about the ways we hide our true selves from others - and ourselves.' - Barack Obama.