Library Manager
Manage your library—your way. Keep a running list or organize archived books into little stacks. i.e. Beach Reads, Cozy Covers, True Crime, etc.
2025 Booker Prize Shortlist & Winner
Six novels, one prize—celebrating the finest literary fiction published in the UK and Ireland.
Are you a Booker Prize fan? Not yet? Then let this year’s winner, David Szalay’s Flesh, or any title from the shortlist be your invitation. You won’t regret it.
Celebrating literary excellence above all else, the Booker Prize honors six novels written in English and published in the UK or Ireland—each one offering prose that leaps off the page and a story that lingers long after the final line.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is high on my TBR; I’m drawn to Kiran Desai’s immersive, sensory storytelling. And our romance literary critic, Kayleigh Donaldson, praises Katie Kitamura’s Audition, featured below.
From Hungary to Japan, Venice to New York, India to England’s West Country, this year’s shortlist spans continents, but truly captures the human experience in a powerful, chorus of voices you won’t forget.
In her review, critic Kayleigh Donaldson writes:
Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She, the narrator, is a celebrated actress in rehearsals for a new part. He is... well, that's one of the questions at the heart of Audition, the latest novel by Katie Kitamura.
This sharply written deconstruction of family, performance, and public/private life sees the author at the height of her powers. Our narrator is always watching, always picking apart the details of her life and others. Her lunch guest, Xavier, has studied her, she believes. Has he appropriated her movements and tics, or are they rooted in something more familial? Xavier makes a claim she insists is impossible, but then, later in the book, it’s accepted as truth, sort of. Is this all a rehearsal for something bigger, and our narrator is simply being a consummate professional? To give any more away would be unfair to the prospective reader. Audition is, in many senses of the word, an uncanny read.
Kitamura has written several novels about nameless professional women navigating the treacherous liminal space between public and private, but this book is no retread of her past efforts. The author teases out much intrigue from this enigmatic protagonist and her evasiveness towards the world, the reader, and herself. Our narrator is struggling to find her way into her new role, for a play called The Opposite Shore. She knows her whole life is defined by roles and parts, but this shape-shifting can be emotionally draining, dangerous even. What is the relationship between acting on the stage and performing a version of oneself for the world?
Audition doesn't offer easy answers, and many may find its opacity frustrating. But its seemingly contradictory nature, flipping between truth and "real" and never sure of the difference, offers an enigmatic portrait of personhood.
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