Audition

Katie Kitamura's fifth novel is narrated by an unnamed actress in New York who is rehearsing a new play, The Opposite Shore. Its opening pages describe her lunch in a Manhattan restaurant with Xavier, a young man who tells her that he is her son, something she believes cannot be true. From there two competing narratives unfold, examining the roles people perform as partners, parents and artists and what those performances keep hidden. Kitamura found the idea in a headline about a stranger claiming to be someone's son. It was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize and reached the final round of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2026.

Barack Obama included it among his favorite books of summer 2025, describing a quiet novel about the ways people conceal their true selves from others.