Audition by Katie Kitamura
Kitamura starts us out with a tight and masterful portrayal of people playing roles, and thinking about playing roles. Then, at about the halfway point, the stakes are changed, not in terms of register but in terms of what stories are and can do.
Like many novels that contest and break expectations,Auditionis not a general-purpose recommendation. (I would expect it to have the lowest Goodreads star rating of any book on this list, for example.) But for readers who are interested in what else is possible in a book, or hell, what else is possible in a life,Auditionis something other than satisfying—it is confounding, provocative, and new.—Jeff O’Neal
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