Like writers of The Michigan Daily Book Review past, our fearless reviewers are once again tackling the Booker Prize Shortlist. Every year, six English-language books published in the UK and Ireland are nominated, and six Daily reviews follow. Join us as we make our way through this year’s list over the next couple weeks, and, before the announcement Nov. 10, tune in for our final predictions piece, where we will share who we think will win (and who we think should).
— Cora Rolfes, Senior Arts editor, and Alex Hetzler, Books Beat Editor
Content warning: This article contains discussions of miscarriage.
As women, we are often taught to believe that motherhood fundamentally changes us — in both incredible and traumatizing ways. To become a mother is seen as the end-all be-all of womanhood, the role we are put on this earth to play; for those who follow this line of thinking, motherhood gives us purpose. Yet, becoming a mother, beautiful as that transformation may be, is also a change deeply associated with loss — of your body, of your autonomy and of yourself.
Katie Kitamura’s “Audition,” one of the six books shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025, explores these central conflicts of motherhood with an expert hand. The nominee tells the story of an unnamed actress and her shifting relationship with a young man named Xavier. In the first part of the novel, Xavier comes to the narrator claiming to be her long-lost son; in the second part, he has always been her child, forcing the narrator into two very different roles.
In less than 200 pages, Kitamura uses these characters to paint a picture of the protagonist’s life in two alternate timelines — one based in a reality in which she decided to have children, and one in which she did not. The novel outlines the life of the actress in terms of what she is set to gain or lose from motherhood, the role she plays in each recounted version of her life and the truths that lie behind every mask she wears.
Below, we’ve examined each of these facets of the novel and the ways that they contribute to “Audition” — a book that perhaps says too little and omits too much. Although its craft proficiency and careful exploration of important themes certainly make it deserving of a nomination (and a read), the bold strokes taken make us hesitant to predict a final win for Kitamura’s novel in this year’s Booker Prize.
Motherhood as a trade-off
“Audition” opens with our unnamed narrator — a moderately successful actress living in New York City — meeting a young man for lunch. She is flighty and secretive in this introduction, even more so when her husband enters the restaurant and she hesitates to wave him over, apparently embarrassed by what she’s doing there. It’s unclear at first what this woman’s relationship is to the man seated in front of her — is he a colleague? A student? A secret lover?
It’s only as the story continues, and the narrator describes how she came to meet the young man, Xavier, that we begin to understand their relationship for what it truly is. We learn that, sometime in the last few months, Xavier came to her workplace and told her he believed she was his birth mother, citing an old interview in which she said she’d given up a child around the time he was born. The narrator is somewhat embarrassed to admit she can’t possibly be his birth mother. When he asks why, she admits the journalist who wrote that piece framed her choice as that to give up a baby for adoption, but the narrator never had a baby — she had an abortion.
As her relationship with Xavier persists, the narrator meditates on this choice. She admits that she doesn’t regret getting an abortion, because she didn’t want to be a mother. Instead, she has always been more interested in her second pregnancy, which ended in a miscarriage. She tells us that there was a brief period during this second pregnancy (before she made a choice to have or not have the baby) when she existed between motherhood — not yet a mother but not opposed to becoming one, either. She allows herself, if only for a moment, to imagine what deciding to have a child would mean for her. If anything, this is what she mourns most when she ultimately loses the baby: the ability to make the choice for herself, one way or the other. When Xavier appears as a stand-in for the child she never had, she is given a second chance to wonder what it would have been like to have been a mom.
In part two, her reality shifts. In this alternate life, Xavier is her child, and he’s moving back home to live with her and her husband during a career shift. Motherhood seems to fulfill her here — she clearly loves Xavier and loves having him home. And, yet, having already read the first part of the novel, it’s hard not to question what is missing from the narrator’s life now: What happened to her acting career? What happened to that autonomy she was so proud of? What else has changed that we don’t get to see?
“Audition” keeps a very limited perspective on the narrator’s life, which makes it difficult to say for sure exactly how much of her life changes between the two timelines. Even without knowing all these details for sure, though, the book’s structure forces you to wonder about the price of motherhood, and whether the benefits outweigh the costs. The dual storytelling makes it so that there is no moral weight placed on either decision. In both versions of the story, the narrator is content; her life isn’t significantly better or worse because she has or does not have a child. This true neutrality in the face of such a contentious topic is a difficult feat to achieve, and, if nothing else, it makes “Audition” absolutely worth the read.
Managing Arts Editor Camille Nagy can be reached at camnagy@umich.edu.
Performance as art or identity
If “Audition” has a central theme, it’s motherhood. Specifically, the novel examines motherhood as performance, and what happens when the line between “acting” and “being” dissolves. When we meet the narrator in part one, she is a working actress consumed by rehearsals for a new play that she both admires and struggles to enter fully, plagued by doubt about whether she’s ever truly “in character.” The narrator’s profession as an actress becomes a metaphor for her fractured identity. She is perpetually “in rehearsal,” trying on roles — lover, wife, mother — that never quite fit. By the second part, the book itself seems to “audition” a new genre, flipping the script so that the narrator suddenly is a mother, as if Kitamura has cut to Act II of a play without warning the audience. It is an uneasy shift, like she’s playing a part she doesn’t remember trying out for. Though disorienting, there is something thrilling about Kitamura refusing to explain this sudden costume change.
The title “Audition” feels ironic by the end. Every identity the unnamed narrator inhabits is temporary, contingent — a performance in search of meaning, like she’s waiting for someone to finally step out and say “you’ve got the part.” Even when she speaks about losing herself in a role, we suspect there’s not much self to lose. There’s a kind of self-indulgence in surrendering to performance, in letting the role of “mother” or “wife” consume her, because it offers structure where her own selfhood does not. Even in the domestic scenes of the novel’s second half, she continues performing as a gracious host, a tolerant wife and a patient mother, all while her real emotions churn quietly under the surface. The comfort she finds in these roles doesn’t free her; instead, it traps her in a loop of repetition, where being and acting are indistinguishable.
Kitamura seems to ask whether motherhood is a performance you can ever step out of, or, if, once you’re cast, the curtain ever really comes down.
Daily Arts Contributor Ava Emery can be reached at avaemery@umich.edu.
On treading the border between reality and fantasy
We read about beasts and witches and magical creatures all throughout our childhoods, of places that range far and wide and beyond our wildest dreams. In “Audition,” however, the protagonist — and the reader, by proxy — don’t have to go beyond the confines of real life to immerse themselves in the fantasies we create in our own minds.
The first part of the novel hinges on the impossibility of the unnamed protagonist being a mother, let alone having a son she’s never met. As a result, when the second part of the novel opens on the premise that Xavier is the protagonist’s son, the reader is meant to be shocked. In the first half of the story, the narrator yearned for a family at various points, and the second part of the novel seems to be her mind’s way of giving it to her.
But what is real? What is imagined? And how do we make the conscious decision to enter or exit either world? Comparing the two parts of the novel, it almost seems like the protagonist is more uncomfortable in her role as a career-woman in the first part than she is with her dual role as an actress and a mother in the second part. By the end of the novel, however, it seems like her role as an actress is innate, whereas her role as a mother is an identity she is forced to eventually say goodbye to — a life that doesn’t belong to her. The former appears to be the narrator’s reality, while the latter is her fantasy brought to life.
Near the end of the final chapter, the protagonist looks over at her husband and remarks that she “knew he was not convinced, that some part of him wished to stay inside the performance, inside the fantasy.” Here, the picture-perfect idea of a family comes crumbling down around the narrator at the hands of someone who wasn’t a part of her family in the first place. Was this third-party actor sent to destroy something that wasn’t meant to be? In the end, was it just a matter of time for the imagined reality to come to an end?
The fantasies we make up in our heads guide us through life and make it more bearable. But in the end, they’re just fantasies, aren’t they? “Audition” reminds us that, no matter how badly we may want to stay inside, the bubble is eventually going to burst somehow.
Daily Arts Writer Graciela Batlle Cestero can be reached at gbatllec@umich.edu.
