About the Book
From the author of A Separation, a taut and electrifying story about a woman caught between many truths.
**A New York Times Top 10 Book of 2021**
'An amazing book, beautiful and captivating.' Elif Shafak
'A gorgeous, destabilizing meditation' Raven Leilani
From the author of A Separation, a taut and electrifying story about a woman caught between many truths.
An interpreter has come to The Hague to escape New York and work at the International Court. A woman of many languages and identities, she is looking for a place to finally call home.
She's drawn into simmering personal dramas- her lover, Adriaan, is separated from his wife but still entangled in his marriage. Her friend Jana witnesses a seemingly random act of violence, a crime the interpreter becomes increasingly obsessed with as she befriends the victim's sister. And she's pulled into an explosive political controversy when she's asked to interpret for a former president accused of war crimes.
A woman of quiet passion, she confronts power, love, and violence, both in her personal intimacies and in her work at the Court. She is soon pushed to the precipice, where betrayal and heartbreak threaten to overwhelm her, forcing her to decide what she wants from her life.
'Katie Kitamura writes about being an outsider like no other author. Quiet moments are charged with tension and power. In short, the book is remarkable - beautifully written and intelligent.' Avni Doshi
'A perfect novel - taut and seductive. Kitamura has made the existential thriller all her own, and she effortlessly negotiates the personal and the geopolitical with a complex moral nuance.' Brandon Taylor
'Intimacies is a novel about the ruthlessness of power, the check of virtue, and the purportedly neutral bureaucracy meant to mediate between them. Katie Kitamura is among the most brilliant and profound writers at work today; she reminds me how high the moral stakes of fiction can be.' Garth Greenwell
'Kitamura writes with forceful, direct prose that makes for a bracing read and leaves the reader mesmerized.' Vogue *Best Books to Read in 2021*
About the Author :
Katie Kitamura's most recent novel, A Separation, was a finalist for the Premio von Rezzori and a New York Times Notable Book. It was named a best book of the year by over a dozen publications, translated into 16 languages, and is being adapted for film. Her two previous novels, Gone to the Forest and The Longshot were both finalists for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award. A recipient of fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and Santa Maddalena, Kitamura has written for publications including the New York Times Book Review, Guardian, BOMB, and Triple Canopy. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at New York University.
Review :
Intimacies is a novel about the ruthlessness of power, the check of virtue, and the purportedly neutral bureaucracy meant to mediate between them. Katie Kitamura is among the most brilliant and profound writers at work today; she reminds me how high the moral stakes of fiction can be.
The thrill of Intimacies is in the taut precision of its language, which rings and hums off the page. It's forensic and inquiring, but also bright and alive. You forget to breathe while reading it, and feel with each crafted sentence, each building thought, that you're in the company of a magnificent writer.
Katie Kitamura writes about being an outsider like no other author. Quiet moments are charged with tension and power. In short, the book is remarkable - beautifully written and intelligent.
Intimacies is a perfect novel-taut and seductive. Kitamura has made the existential thriller all her own, and she effortlessly negotiates the personal and the geopolitical with a complex moral nuance. Simply stunning.
Katie Kitamura's Intimacies - she's an incredible writer. It's fiction and a really beautiful exploration of how we can live everyday life while complete horrors and atrocities are happening in the world - how both things coexist.
Saturated with enigmatic longing, Intimacies peels back the layers of sympathy, antipathy, and morality that both connect and divide us from others, unearthing something precious beneath. Katie Kitamura is a revelatory interpreter of the human heart, in all its brilliance and obscurity.
A haunting, precise, and morally astute novel that reads like a psychological thriller. Katie Kitamura is a wonder; her work is striking, stylish, and fully realized.
Katie Kitamura's beautifully wrought new novel is tense and suspenseful, a mystery about human choices. Like a work by Graham Greene, Intimacies kept me in its tight grip.
Kitamura writes with forceful, direct prose that makes for a bracing read and leaves the reader mesmerized.
Katie Kitamura's voice - spare, electric, evocative - could take me anywhere. Especially into this landscape of global wanderers, uprooted women, fragmented souls. Intimacies is a singular pleasure - a dangerous, seductive, dagger of a novel.
Katie Kitamura writes with empathy, confidence, elegance, and fearlessness, her voice is entirely unique, and this novel leaves you feeling deeply unsettled in the best possible way. Read this book and you will see the world slightly differently forever.
An amazing book, beautiful and captivating.
Intimacies, by Katie Kitamura, is a gorgeous, destabilizing meditation on the power differentials built into language and the gradual distortions of our emotional allegiances.
In spare and elegant prose, Kitamura limns her unnamed protagonist's search for home and gifts us a powerful, beautiful book.
Such a beauty - I love this book.
The thrill of Intimacies is in the taut precision of its language, which rings and hums off the page. It's forensic and inquiring, but also bright and alive. You forget to breathe while reading it, and feel with each crafted sentence, each building thought, that you're in the company of a magnificent writer.
Coolly written and casts a spell... certainly one of the best novels I've read in 2021... a taut, moody novel that moves purposefully between worlds.
Spellbinding... Intimacies is a brilliant examination of language conveyed with the kind of pacing, tautness and menace usually associated with a thriller... [it] is nothing short of magnificent... both a gripping read and a chilling consideration of what's involved when we choose to ignore the things we don't want to see, let alone understand.
[A] graceful, glitteringly intelligent book... Kitamura's prose is gorgeously crisp and precise, and teems with sharp observations about everything from language to coercive relationships... An engrossing and evocative page-turner, Intimacies is also a profound, affecting look at the moral compromises of modern life.
[Intimacies] specificity comes to feel universal... the narrator's atomised experiences, her inability to forge a coherent narrative from her life, will feel compellingly strange as the pages rapidly turn - but also uncomfortably familiar, the book's final intimacy being the one between narrator and reader.
