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Audition

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Audition

By: Katie Kitamura
Narrated by: Traci Kato-Kiriyama
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025**

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.

© Katie Kitamura 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

 Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Psychological Suspense Thriller & Suspense Women's Fiction

Critic Reviews

Kitamura’s great talent is describing the minutiae of human connections, how in the course of seconds an interaction can provoke sympathy, then irritation, followed by confusion. She can turn a single exchange into a symphony of implications
Kitamura is unparalleled . . . Always engaging and thought-provoking . . . Audition is a lightning bolt of a novel
Katie Kitamura’s latest novel, Audition, is slick, sharp, strange and singular. I love her work; she’s a writer who can conjure intrigue from the scantest detail, and you’ll gulp this novel down in one in-breath (Samantha Harvey, Booker Prize-winning author of ORBITAL)
Kitamura's novels are short, sharp and deadly. I’m not sure there’s anyone better writing in America today (Alex Preston)
A literary performance of true uncanniness: one that, in a very real sense, takes on life
Audition has powerful things to say about our present destabilised society . . . This superb, thoughtful novel resonated long after finishing
A quiet novel about the ways we hide our true selves from others – and ourselves (Barack Obama)
Kitamura is always worth reading
Kitamura is totally in control of her prodigious gifts. Her confluence of style and ruthless intelligence is so distinctive that it feels almost like its own genre. Whether she remains in the terrain she has established or not, we are lucky to read her
A daring, riddling novel . . . A literary hall of mirrors that explores the deepest questions about performance, identity and how we relate to each other
All stars
Most relevant
I loved the detailed descriptions of the protagonist's feelings, reactions & ruminations.
I loved that the reactions & feelings described are familiar to me despite the unfamiliar setting & experiences.
I loved the ending...the author questioning the reader/listener/herself.
I loved the paradoxical nature of the story lines.
I was somewhat confused by the shift of truth between part 1 & part 2.

Psychologically suspenseful with familiarity for the reader within the unlikely paradoxes of the parallel stories presented.

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Although quite well written I found this book a bit vacuous and empty. I got bored. I also found the narrators performance really poor . It sound like an app voice reading at times. Also someone please tell the narrator and production editor that Xavier is pronounced with a ‘Z’ not ‘X’ !

Not for me

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Work like this should come with a warning to readers that the result is so abstract it becomes a punishing exercise in wasting both time and money.

I found Kitamura to be an awful wordsmith. Her writing is flat and uninspired. That, coupled with the monotone pitch of the narrator made this, without a doubt, the worst audible experience I’ve ever had.

Abstract nonsense.

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In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.