Tag Archives: Katie Kitamura

Four Favorite Books of 2025

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What books do you love that aren’t strictly in the canon? Here is my list of three neglected “older” books and one new novel longlisted for the Booker Prize. 

1. The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot, by Angus Wilson.  This neglected novel won the Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1958.  You can find a copy online, but I defy you to find it in a bookstore.

Meg Eliot is a bossy, charming middle-aged woman who dominates committees,  hosts parties to boost her husband’s career, and organizes a vacation with and for her overworked husband.

And then it happens.  During a layover in a third-world country, her husband is shot and killed at an airport.  Suddenly she is is penniless, unemployable, and angry at her husband’s quixotic act. (He threw himself in front of a man to save him from an assassination attempt.) She enrolls in secretarial school, but it will be months before she graduates.  During this period of living in shabby rooms and trying to find an affordable home, she tries living, separately, with two of her impecunious friends, and alienates them, because she runs everything like a committee.

Meg Eliot is one of my favorite fictional characters. Wilson’s witty dialogue, brilliant prose, and insight into her character makes this a joy to read. Mrs. Eliot seems to change, but does she really?

The best novel I’ve read this year.

2. Audition, by Katie Kitamura. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, this graceful novel is the most elegant I’ve read this year.  The prose is spare, lyrical, precise, and even icy. The narrator is an actress, trying to get her part right in rehearsals. Other characters demand her attention: a young man who may or may not be her son, and a husband who is unfaithful in a shocking betrayal. It’s a complex novel. What is real and what not?

3.  The Corner That Held Them, by Sylvia Townsend Warner. Do you like nun novels?  This is much better than Rumer Godden’s nun novels, Black Narcissus and In This House of Brede. Set in the Middle Ages, the novel charts the lives of generations of nuns: they endure the Plague, survive wars and pettily fight over politics. The question is often: who will be the next Mother Superior? Beautifully-written, and perhaps an inspiration for Muriel Spark’s The Abbess of Crewe.

4.  Cecilia, by Fanny Burney.  This month I finished this delightful 18th century novel, from which Jane Austen borrowed the phrase “Pride and Prejudice.” Cecilia, an heiress, struggles for independence, control of her money, and works to deflect unwanted suitors. It’s a great novel, though slightly less great when the marriage plot kicks in. Still, it’s a classic I love and recommend.

And if you can think of any stunning neglected novels, I’d like to add them to my list!

Booker Prize Longlist 2025:  Katie Kitamura’s “Audition”

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“I had given in to his story… because of his persuasiveness – persuasion, which is only one step away from coercion.” – Audition, by Katie Kitamura

I am not suggesting that Katie Kitamura’s glittering novel is a retelling of Austen’s Persuasion. Both titles have three syllables, and that’s the extent of it, on the surface. Kitamura’s Audition centers on theater and performance, mothers and sons, and the quantity of an actor’s roles onstage and in life.

 And yet the words persuasion and persuasiveness, a sly allusion to Austen’s novel, are repeated in Kitamura’s Audition.  The narrator is the prey of persuasion, specifically by her husband, and she says it is “one step away from coercion.”  Anne Elliot in Persuasion has a different take: she defends the act of persuasion that separated her from her lover for seven years. But that is done in a moment of malice, when her ex-lover pays the consequences of another woman’s impulsiveness.

Kitamura’s strange little book is certainly striking. The prose is spare, the sentences lyrically icy. Divided into two parts, this extraordinary novel revolves around three characters: the narrator, who is a famous actress,  her husband, Tomas, a writer, and Xavier, a young man who may or may not be their son. 

In Part I, the narrator struggles with her role in a  play:  she cannot quite get the central scene right. And then Xavier, a young man who looks like her, shows up at the theater and asks if she is his mother. (He was adopted.) She laughs;  she has never given birth.  But she is rattled. He looks so much like her. He gets a job as an assistant in the theater, and his personality changes.  “There was no trace of the young man I had encountered only one week earlier, vibrating with uncertainty, he seemed to be a completely different person.”

In Part II, the relationships change. Xavier is now the son of the narrator and Tomas.  The narrator is in a critically-acclaimed play that is finally coming to an end.  Xavier works as a director’s assistant, but he has two months off and asks if he can move home. Tomas is the doting father: he persuades the narrator that there is enough space. And this is an act of persuasion she regrets. She was right to be reluctant. The results are horrifying.

I didn’t love it – I need more emotional connection – but it is a gorgeous book.