Audition

**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'Slick, sharp, strange and singular . . . You’ll gulp this novel down in one in-breath' SAMANTHA HARVEY, Booker Prize-winning author of Orbital'A lightning bolt of a novel' FINANCIAL TIMES'I’m not sure there’s anyone better writing in America today' ALEX PRESTON, ObserverOne woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. An exhilarating, destabilising novel that asks whether we ever really know the people we loveTwo 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.