An unnamed actress meets a young man, Xavier, in a Manhattan restaurant. He is young and charismatic; she is losing confidence in herself. Two weeks earlier, he turned up unexpectedly at her play rehearsal to confess a theory he has: he is her son. This is impossible: we see in flashbacks that she is childless and has remained so. And yet the certainty of the stranger’s belief is striking to her, as are his artistic ambition and his interest in her past work.

In the book’s second half, the circumstances flip. Xavier is her son. He has finished college and is moving back home. The play that was going terribly in rehearsal is now considered the narrator’s best performance to date, while her marriage to Tomas, a writer, has come under strain. Where before there was ‘the tacit understanding that I contained the threat to the marriage’, the narrator now recognises that the threat is posed by Tomas. She is confronted with a fresh view of her life, and it nauseates her. 

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. This voice does not really reflect the way anyone thinks or talks – ‘I was