LF271 Booker Books: "Audition," by Katie Kitamura

Audition, by Katie Kitamura, is a taut, psychologically charged novel that examines intimacy, performance, and the fragile boundaries between truth and self-invention. The story centers on a woman whose carefully constructed life—shaped by her marriage, her work, and her sense of control—begins to fracture when an encounter tied to an audition unsettles her assumptions about those closest to her. Small moments of uncertainty accumulate, exposing the quiet power dynamics and unspoken compromises that structure her relationships.

As the narrative tightens, Kitamura shifts the ground beneath the reader, revealing how identity can be shaped by what we choose to show, conceal, or rehearse for others. The novel becomes less about a single event than about the roles people play to survive emotional proximity, and the cost of maintaining those roles over time. Spare, precise, and deeply unsettling, Audition probes the tension between observation and participation, asking how well we can ever know another person—or even ourselves—once performance becomes indistinguishable from reality.

Audition was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 2025. It was long-listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize.

Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered by one week prior to the meeting, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

The Booker Book group reads and discusses books that have either received, or been on the short list for, the Booker Prize.