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Oct 24

2025 Booker Shortlist: Audition

Next up is Audition by Katie Kitamura. You can read our short reviews here: Audition. The novel made it onto 4 of our predictions lists with all by Lisa predicting it will make the shortlist. The Booker judges had this to say about the book…

‘This novel begins with an actress meeting a young man in a Manhattan restaurant. A surprising, unsettling conversation unfolds, but far more radical disturbances are to come. Aside from the extraordinarily honed quality of its sentences, the remarkable thing about Audition is the way it persists in the mind after reading, like a knot that feels tantalisingly close to coming free. Denying us the resolution we instinctively crave from stories, Kitamura takes Chekhov’s dictum – that the job of the writer is to ask questions, not answer them – and runs with it, presenting a puzzle, the solution to which is undoubtedly obscure, and might not even exist at all.’

What does our panel think of the odds of this book being this year’s winner? Keep reading to find out

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