Audition – Katie Kitamura

READ FOR BOOKERTHON

Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubled, and young. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In Audition, two competing but mirroring narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles the characters play and the truths every person’s individual performance masks.

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.

RACHEL
● Audition is a sleek, contemporary and performative novel. It has a simple plot with the twists and surprises coming in the form of narrative structure rather than the characters’ actions. As a reader I felt involved, sometimes lost!, but always deeply involved as if the protagonist was speaking just to me. As an actor she kept changing her performance to influence how people perceived her, and was continually engaging her audience, both fictional and me, the reader. When there was a huge narrative jump in the middle of the book I had to have faith in the author and the protagonist in order to take the leap too. I’m glad I did, the other side was exhilarating. I read the book twice and the re-read was a like a completely new reading experience from the first.

SUZY
● It’s a crying shame that in the midst of frantically trying get through the Booker shortlist I do not have the time to revisit Audition, because I desperately want to. It needs to be read again with a different lens and each sentence picked apart. What initially presents as a relatively simple story is anything but. This is my favourite type of Booker novel and I am in awe of the author. 

Published 2025
Riverhead Books
197 pages