A New York Times Top 10 Book of 2021

Intimacies

**AS HEARD ON BBC RADIO 4** 
 
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. 
 
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. 
 
One of Barack Obama's Favourite 2021 Reads 
A New York Times Top 10 Book of 2021 
 
'One of my favourite novels of the past few years' Caleb Azumah Nelson 
 
'Captivating' Elif Shafak 
 
'Charged with tension and power' Avni Doshi 
 
'Simply stunning' Brandon Taylor 
 
'Gorgeous' Raven Leilani

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.

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.

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.

Katie Kitamura writes with empathy, confidence, elegance, and fearlessness, her voice is entirely unique, and this novel leaves you feeling deeply unsettled in the best possible way. Read this book and you will see the world slightly differently forever.

An amazing book, beautiful and captivating.

Intimacies, by Katie Kitamura, is a gorgeous, destabilizing meditation on the power differentials built into language and the gradual distortions of our emotional allegiances.

Coolly written and casts a spell... certainly one of the best novels I've read in 2021... a taut, moody novel that moves purposefully between worlds.

Spellbinding... Intimacies is a brilliant examination of language conveyed with the kind of pacing, tautness and menace usually associated with a thriller... [it] is nothing short of magnificent... both a gripping read and a chilling consideration of what's involved when we choose to ignore the things we don't want to see, let alone understand.

[A] graceful, glitteringly intelligent book... Kitamura's prose is gorgeously crisp and precise, and teems with sharp observations about everything from language to coercive relationships... An engrossing and evocative page-turner, Intimacies is also a profound, affecting look at the moral compromises of modern life.

[Intimacies] specificity comes to feel universal... the narrator's atomised experiences, her inability to forge a coherent narrative from her life, will feel compellingly strange as the pages rapidly turn - but also uncomfortably familiar, the book's final intimacy being the one between narrator and reader.

Kitamura's...language is measured with extreme care, to maximise a sense of the complex, ambiguous and multiple... an effect that proves spellbinding.

Intimacies... completely revamped the way I thought about fiction, What would it mean to write without all the tricks that a write can so easily hide behind?

Intimacies is an existential thriller laced with tensions on both personal and political levels.

An elegant study of the rewards and dangers of intimacy... Kitamura's subtle and perceptive novel glitters with insight into language love and the way we interpret others

Deft and sharply written, with a beautiful rhythm and clear voice, it's one of my favourite novels of the past few years.

Caleb Azumah Nelson, author of OPEN WATER

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.

Katie Kitamura's most recent novel, A Separation, was a finalist for the Premio von Rezzori and a New York Times Notable Book. It was named a best book of the year by over a dozen publications, translated into 16 languages, and is being adapted for film. Her two previous novels, Gone to the Forest and The Longshot were both finalists for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award. A recipient of fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and Santa Maddalena, Kitamura has written for publications including the New York Times Book Review, Guardian, BOMB, and Triple Canopy. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at New York University.

Katie Kitamura

Acutely aware of the very real trauma that attends the loosening of personhood, Audition . . . thrills at the freedoms made possible through collapse. The result is a literary performance of true uncanniness: one that, in a very real sense, takes on life

Kitamura's novels are short, sharp and deadly. I’m not sure there’s anyone better writing in America today

Kitamura is unparalleled . . . Always engaging and thought-provoking . . . Audition is a lightning bolt of a novel

Audition has powerful things to say about our present destabilised society . . . This superb, thoughtful novel resonated long after finishing

A blisteringly incisive, coolly devastating tour de force of controlled menance . . . Bold, stark, genre-bending, Audition will haunt your dreams

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

You have never read anything like this gorgeously disquieting book. Audition challenges our preconceptions about love, art and selfhood – and, magnificently, our very idea of how a novel should unfold. If all the world’s a stage, Kitamura reminds us that we never stop auditioning for our parts

Katie Kitamura is a dizzyingly skilled writer, whose fictions always seem to manage two contradictory effects: a supple seductive surface, under which the chaos of minds and repressed realities roil. She’s an original, building an entire metier of her own

Katie Kitamura is one of our most brilliant writers, saying far more in her silences, blank spaces and disruptions than most novelists can say in a hundred thousand words

Kitamura . . . has quietly built a reputation as one of America's best contemporary writers

A short, propulsive novel . . . Kitamura does a good job of creating a sense of the uncanny and feeling of dread

Kitamura is a formidable writer. With every chapter of Audition, she pushes at the walls of the novel, remaking it, expanding it, patiently and with gathering force. The result is extraordinary – an elegant, vertiginous work that is completely its own thing

Sublime writing from one word to the next, from the first word to the last

Beguilingly wonderful in its scrutiny of artistic process, ritual and selfhood

You won't really know what Audition is about until you read it (and even then, you may have trouble deciding what and who to believe) . . . A sharp exploration of the performances we put on every day

Katie Kitamura only writes intense and fascinating novels

An elegant knife of a story . . . In this searing, chilly and psychologically profound story lies insight into some harrowing human questions

Katie Kitamura writes with a spare, almost clinical efficiency, but that doesn’t limit the depth of her characters or the complexity of the dynamics she depicts . . . The strange pendulum swing from one scenario to the other catches you off guard – and isn’t that the mark of truly exciting fiction?

Katie Kitamura is among the most brilliant and profound writers at work today

Written in Kitamura's unshakeably elegant prose, Audition is an emotional, intelligent, intensely stylish novel that reads like walking on quicksand: shocking, eerie, disorienting and utterly immersive. A mesmeric experience. It floored me

Katie Kitamura is a revelatory interpreter of the human heart, in all its brilliance and obscurity

Katie Kitamura’s distinctive new novel, Audition, forms a loose trilogy with her two previous books, A Separation and Intimacies – if not in terms of plot or character, then in terms of narrative voice . . . Seductive in its consistency . . . Thrillingly done

With taut, hypnotic prose, Audition captures the unease of human connection and the inherent instability of self-presentation . . . A thrilling, disorienting read that lingers long after the final page

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

Praise for Audition

Acutely aware of the very real trauma that attends the loosening of personhood, Audition . . . thrills at the freedoms made possible through collapse. The result is a literary performa ...

Kitamura's novels are short, sharp and deadly. I’m not sure there’s anyone better writing in America today

Kitamura is unparalleled . . . Always engaging and thought-provoking . . . Audition is a lightning bolt of a novel

Acutely aware of the very real trauma that attends the loosening of personhood, Audition . . . thrills at the freedoms made possible through collapse. The result is a literary performa ...

Kitamura's novels are short, sharp and deadly. I’m not sure there’s anyone better writing in America today

Kitamura is unparalleled . . . Always engaging and thought-provoking . . . Audition is a lightning bolt of a novel

Acutely aware of the very real trauma that attends the loosening of personhood, Audition . . . thrills at the freedoms made possible through collapse. The result is a literary performa ...

Kitamura's novels are short, sharp and deadly. I’m not sure there’s anyone better writing in America today

Kitamura is unparalleled . . . Always engaging and thought-provoking . . . Audition is a lightning bolt of a novel

Books by Katie Kitamura

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