Katie Kitamura’s Audition was recommended to me by a trusted bookseller and I know better than to argue with the veterans. So I picked it up and binged it that day. Unsurprisingly, it quickly became my favourite of the Booker Shortlist.

You might have noticed that I don’t review literary fiction much up here. Even though books are all very subjectively interpreted, I believe lit fic has a way of being too personal and who am I to tell you if one is worth your time and the other is not in this case?

However, the Booker Shortlist kind of opens it up for discussion. Well, that logic applies to the longlist too, I suppose, and I will get to the whole Booker’s dozen if I can, but we are tackling the Booker Shortlist for 2025 so far. So buckle in, this one is going to be a wild ride.

Audition is the performance of the self that is also set in a world of performance. Our unnamed protagonist lives in her head — going over every conversation, every genture, every interaction and every insignificant look.

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As a woman, unnamed and a racial minority in the US, she is constantly performing one role or another, on or off the stage. Between the self and the reality falls the shadow of deceit in this plot. The relationships between the narrator and her husband, Tomas, and the stranger that forced his way into their lives, Xavier, are fraught with distrust. This paired with the narrator’s paranoia in the first part of the book, creates a sense of mystery and anxious energy in the plot.

While she grapples with her waning career and a middle age with familial dissatisfaction, Xavier ingratiates himself into her life — her regular cafe stop, her play, her director.

She is struggling to portray the role she is playing in her latest work. She calls the director and writer, both women, clueless. She keeps herself one step removed from the other actresses of the play and doesn’t wish to get involved in their drama where she could actually play a role of a mentor. Her husband is possibly lying about his whereabouts and who he is meeting and she sees how not having children in their lives has driven them apart. Then, there’s Xavier trying to make audacious claims about his relation to her.

This is all in the first act of the plot. Just as the performance begins, just as Tomas says they better talk, the act cuts off.

In the second act, they are hosting Xavier in their house, effectively filling the childless space, but in this version, Xavier has always been their son, moving back in after a while. But what begins as a request to occupy as little space as possible, ends up being all about taking over their space and lives, owning them.

She is now wrapping up the shows of the now highly successful play. The writing and direction are brillantly praised now. There are threads of connection to the first part and then they are just perceived differently enough to keep the readers confused. The feeling I got most while reading this short book was of looking at the lives of three strangers through a window. Oh, and everything is falling apart.

Everyone is deluding themselves into playing their respective roles in their private lives. By playing a role even behind closed doors, the reality is warped.

She was having trouble with a scene of the play which she argues was a bridge of sorts, trying to connect the two acts of the play and the writer wrote it poorly to actually make any sense. The fact that there were no bridges connecting the two acts of this book and in the second act, she has this alleged scene down to the T is a very clever stylistic choice on the part of the author.

This meta-narrative plays really well into the plot of the novel as the second act throws everything from the act one out the window. But the performance of it doesn’t stop.

I couldn’t tell right away if I liked or disliked the story, but I was instantly fascinated. As Xavier takes better hold of their lives and invites his girlfriend over to stay, the relationship dynamics are put in flux again. Despite being the connection to Xavier, the narrator is slowly pushed out as Tomas, Xavier and Hana, the girlfriend, make their own alliances. Tomas is less of an obstacle in Xavier’s path, he is happy to bend over backwards for their convenience. Ironically, that helps her finally kick them out and take back control of her own life.

Her and Xavier’s relationship go from implications of an affair to mother figure to ultimately being his actual mother. The complexities of feelings in the narrator’s mind about Xavier is indicative of her personality and Katie Kitamura has aced this.

It is only pity for this unnamed woman that I was left with after finishing the book. A career that’s fizzling out, the ache of unrealised motherhood, a failing marriage and her instability in her life to the point that she doesn’t know where ot what role to settle into makes for a sordid tale of a life actually well-lived but still left unsatisfied.

I don’t like the implication that having a child of their own would have helped her avoid this existential crisis. The child could have been exactly like Xavier and the couple could have been reduced to serving all his needs without living their own. Would that have made them content? The author doesn’t provide any conclusive answer to that. But the characters keep making space for Xavier, so maybe yes?

It is a personal triller, just bizarre enough to keep you turning the page. It’s short, snappy and feels once-removed in lieu of these things happening to other people who aren’t not relatable and not even named in all cases. But then you recognise the core of the performance of life, of relationships with other people, and then it is actually happening to you.

I am still thinking about this book 3 months later. In that way, I am certain that this one was worth it. I will be making time for Katie Kitamura’s backlist.

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Have you read Audition? Did you read any of the other Booker books from 2025’s list? What are your thoughts on it?

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