‘Audition’

Audition is a novel by Katie Kitamura. It was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize and it was a finalist for the 2026 Pulitzer Prize.

The story – written in first person, past tense – explores the narrator’s experience of being an actress, a wife, and a ‘mother’. The stage and thespian world are used as a backdrop to the explain the disconnected happenstance, the acted out ‘unreality’ of the real world. Stage craft is contextualised with people acting out their relationships.

At first, I was expecting more of a plotted drama, but then I realised that this is a literary fiction experience that’s primarily about nuance and the nature of existence. The story is framed through the woman’s encounter with a young man who claims to be her son – even though she knows that he’s lying. He inserts himself into her life in an act of ‘brood parasitism’, appearing like a cuckoos egg in a warbler’s nest.

The stranger as ‘kin’ scenario is a literary metaphor for the close distance of relationships, where people are intimate with one another and yet emotionally detached.