Audition is a novel started with two strangers (or perhaps not really strangers?) sharing a table. She is an actress, on the edge of a big premiere. He is younger, magnetic, and carrying an air of something unsaid. The scene reads like the opening of something ordinary, right? Well, it isn’t.

Audition by Katie Kitamura uses that deceptively beginning as a doorway into far murkier story. Beneath the surface of this woman’s life, runs an undercurrent of tension that builds when a person has spent years wearing different faces for different rooms being a partner, a mother, an artist, a muse, and a professional. Every version of herself carefully curated, even, maybe especially, for the ones she loves most.

Kitamura captures inner turmoil that makes the protagonist’s impossible crossroads feel achingly real. As a reader, I watched the character wrestle with her decision while feeling the weight of it alongside her.

Audition is split into two parts, and the second half is a different beast. The story gets denser, more elusive, almost dream-like. I wasn’t sure what I read. I believe that no two readers of this book will arrive at the same conclusion of what this book is actually about.

My Favorite Bits

• People always talked about having children as an event, as a thing that took place, they forgot that not having children was also something that took place, that is to say it wasn’t a question of absence, a question of lack, it had its own presence in the world, it was its own event.

• There are always two stories taking place at once, the narrative inside the play and the narrative around it, and the boundary between the two is more porous than you might think, that is both the danger and the excitement of the performance.

Author: Katie Kitamura
Publication date: 8 April 2025
Number of pages: 197 pages