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Intimacies

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Intimacies

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

Brought to you by Penguin.

From the author of A Separation, a taut and electrifying story about a woman caught between many truths.

An interpreter has come to The Hague to escape New York and work at the International Court. A woman of many languages and identities, she is looking for a place to finally call home.

She's drawn into simmering personal dramas: her lover, Adriaan, is separated from his wife but still entangled in his marriage. Her friend Jana witnesses a seemingly random act of violence, a crime the interpreter becomes increasingly obsessed with as she befriends the victim's sister. And she's pulled into an explosive political controversy when she's asked to interpret for a former president accused of war crimes.

A woman of quiet passion, she confronts power, love, and violence, both in her personal intimacies and in her work at the Court. She is soon pushed to the precipice, where betrayal and heartbreak threaten to overwhelm her, forcing her to decide what she wants from her life.

© Katie Kitamura 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

 Amateur Sleuths Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Mystery Psychological Women's Fiction Marriage Heartfelt Detective

Critic Reviews

Intimacies is a novel about the ruthlessness of power, the check of virtue, and the purportedly neutral bureaucracy meant to mediate between them. Katie Kitamura is among the most brilliant and profound writers at work today; she reminds me how high the moral stakes of fiction can be.
The thrill of Intimacies is in the taut precision of its language, which rings and hums off the page. It's forensic and inquiring, but also bright and alive. You forget to breathe while reading it, and feel with each crafted sentence, each building thought, that you're in the company of a magnificent writer.
Katie Kitamura writes about being an outsider like no other author. Quiet moments are charged with tension and power. In short, the book is remarkable - beautifully written and intelligent.
Intimacies is a perfect novel-taut and seductive. Kitamura has made the existential thriller all her own, and she effortlessly negotiates the personal and the geopolitical with a complex moral nuance. Simply stunning.
Katie Kitamura's Intimacies - she's an incredible writer. It's fiction and a really beautiful exploration of how we can live everyday life while complete horrors and atrocities are happening in the world - how both things coexist. (Natalie Portman)
Saturated with enigmatic longing, Intimacies peels back the layers of sympathy, antipathy, and morality that both connect and divide us from others, unearthing something precious beneath. Katie Kitamura is a revelatory interpreter of the human heart, in all its brilliance and obscurity.
A haunting, precise, and morally astute novel that reads like a psychological thriller. Katie Kitamura is a wonder; her work is striking, stylish, and fully realized. (Dana Spiotta)
Katie Kitamura's beautifully wrought new novel is tense and suspenseful, a mystery about human choices. Like a work by Graham Greene, Intimacies kept me in its tight grip.
Kitamura writes with forceful, direct prose that makes for a bracing read and leaves the reader mesmerized.
Katie Kitamura's voice - spare, electric, evocative - could take me anywhere. Especially into this landscape of global wanderers, uprooted women, fragmented souls. Intimacies is a singular pleasure - a dangerous, seductive, dagger of a novel.
All stars
Most relevant
Great story about a multi-lingual ‘citizen of the world’ on a one-year contract as an interpreter at the International Criminal Court at The Hague. Her morally shiftless personal life leaves her incapable of drawing black and white moral lines around the cases she is acting on as an interpreter. Overall? Interesting themes, let down by a mediocre narrator. Perhaps the flatness of her delivery was part of the plan, but it all felt a bit cold.

Themes of moral equivalence

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