Publication Date: 05/08/2021 ISBN: 9781787332003 Category:

Intimacies

Katie Kitamura

Publisher: Vintage Publishing
Publication Date: 05/08/2021 ISBN: 9781787332003 Category:
Hardback

£14.99

Out of stock

Description

*A NEW STATESMAN AND OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021*
**A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2021**

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.

‘An amazing book, beautiful and captivating.’ Elif Shafak

‘A gorgeous, destabilizing meditation’ Raven Leilani

‘Kitamura writes with forceful, direct prose that makes for a bracing read and leaves the reader mesmerized.’ Vogue *Best Books to Read in 2021*

Publisher 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. * Garth Greenwell * 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 * 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 * 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. * Alexandra Kleeman * 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. -- Dana Spiotta 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. * Lynne Tillman * Kitamura writes with forceful, direct prose that makes for a bracing read and leaves the reader mesmerized. * Vogue *Best Books to Read in 2021* * 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. * Danzy Senna * 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. * Tahmima Anam * Intimacies, by Katie Kitamura, is a gorgeous, destabilizing meditation on the power differentials built into language and the gradual distortions of our emotional allegiances. * Raven Leilani *

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