LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN FICTION
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE 2021 READS
AN INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER
A BEST BOOK OF 2021 FROM Washington Post, Vogue, Time, Oprah Daily, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Atlantic, Kirkus and Entertainment Weekly
“Intimacies is a haunting, precise, and morally astute novel that reads like a psychological thriller…. Katie Kitamura is a wonder.” —Dana Spiotta, author of Wayward and Eat the Document
“One of the best novels I’ve read in 2021.” – Dwight Garner, The New York Times
A novel from the author of A Separation, an 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.
“[C]ooly written and casts a spell… One of Kitamura’s gifts… is to inject every scene with a pinprick of dread…. One of the best novels I’ve read in 2021… A taut, moody novel that moves purposefully between worlds.” —Dwight Garner, New York Times
"Kitamura’s prose elegantly breaks grammatical convention… this style mirrors the book’s concern with the bleeding lines between intimacies — especially between the sincere and the coercive — while Kitamura’s immense talent smooths the seams…. A novel like this one offers the reader much to work with, raising a chorus of harmonic questions rather than squealing a single answer. Contemporary American novels too often deliver pre-solved moral quandaries and obvious enemies in service to our cultural craving for ethical perfection — the correct word, the right behavior, the sole and righteous position on myriad complex issues. Kitamura works outside of this trendy literality by knowing, as the best writers do, that a story’s apparent subject does not determine its conceptual limits; plot summary would do this book no justice…. Kitamura’s work also contains a keen understanding of human behavior, one that reaches far beyond the pages of this brief and arresting book; she travels to places that ordinary writers cannot go." —Catherine Lacey, The New York Times Book Review
"Calling all Rachel Cuskheads and W.G. Sebald stans! Kitamura is a novelist of enchanting imagination and minimalist prose style.... The novel’s plot twists are of the subtle, jaw-tightening variety rather than the dramatic, stomach-knotting sort, but it’s still fair to call it a ‘psychological thriller.’ Intimacies is for those who like their addictive novels to sneak up behind them rather than slap them in the face.” —Molly Young, Vulture
"An amazing book, beautiful and captivating’" —Elif Shafak
“I love how Katie Kitamura can channel a mind.” —Ruth Ozeki, Observer UK, Best Books of the Year)
“Katie Kitamura’s fourth novel spins a taut web of dread from the start. . . In cool, spare prose, Kitamura asks the book’s animating query: How should you go about your little life in a world where horrible things are happening?” —Stephanie Hayes, The Atlantic
“Intimacies is a haunting, precise, and morally astute novel that reads like a psychological thriller. It expertly and concisely delves into the paradoxes of language—how language can obscure our own complicity, and how language can enable us to escape our own delusions. Katie Kitamura is a wonder; her work is striking, stylish, and fully realized.” —Dana Spiotta, author of Innocents and Others and Eat the Document
“Gripping and elegant. No one’s work simmers with emotional complexity like Katie Kitamura’s.” —Mira Jacob, author of Good Talk
"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, author of Cleanness and What Belongs to You
“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, author of Burnt Sugar
“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.” —Brandon Taylor, author of Real Life and Filthy Animals
“A watchful, reticent woman sees peril and tries not to vanish… It's a delight to accompany the narrator’s astute observational intelligence through these pages… She hears and doesn’t hear the words amid her focus, just as she sees and doesn’t completely register events in her everyday life…This is the crux of Kitamura’s preoccupation. She threads it brilliantly through the intimacies her character is trying to navigate: with new colleagues, women friends, and her beau, who goes away; with the work and with the nature of The Hague itself…The novel packs a controlled but considerable wallop, all the more pleasurable for its nuance. This psychological tone poem is a barbed and splendid meditation on peril.” —Kirkus (STARRED review)
