Intimacies

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 *
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. * Samantha Harvey *
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 *
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. -- Natalie Portman * Vogue *
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 *
An amazing book, beautiful and captivating. * Elif Shafak *
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 *
In spare and elegant prose, Kitamura limns her unnamed protagonist's search for home and gifts us a powerful, beautiful book. * Chika Unigwe *
Such a beauty - I love this book. -- Evie Wyld
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. * Samantha Harvey *
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. * New York Times *
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. -- Lucy Scholes * Financial Times *
[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. -- Gwendolyn Smith * i *
[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. -- Chris Power * Guardian, *Book of the Day* *