Audition (Riverhead Books)

Katie Kitamura is the author of Audition, longlisted for the 2026 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, and was a finalist for The Booker Prize, NBCC Award in Fiction, and Gotham Book Prize. She is also author of five previous novels, including A Separation and Intimacies, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award and was a finalist for a Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She is a recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature, a Lannan fellowship, and many other honors, and her work has been translated into twenty-one languages. She teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.

Audition by Katie Kitamura

One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. A mesmerizing Mobius strip of a novel that asks who we are to the people we love. Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an elegant and accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, and 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 best. Taut, hypnotic, Audition is Katie Kitamura at her virtuosic best.