
Intimacies
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Traci Kato-Kiriyama
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By:
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Katie Kitamura
About this listen
A New York Times Top 10 Book of 2021
Longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award in Fiction
One of Barack Obama’s Favorite 2021 Reads
An Instant National Best Seller
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.
©2021 Katie Kitamura (P)2021 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“[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)
“[I]ntense, unsettling...Intimacies is very much a story that seems to be something familiar but soon morphs into something disorientingly strange.... [W]ith her Jamesian attention to the slightest movement of bodies and words, Kitamura keeps Intimacies rooted to the ordinary domestic experiences of her narrator, her petty jealousies, her passing suspicions. The effect is a kind of emotional intensity that’s gripping because it feels increasingly unsustainable. Who could endure that raw-nerve sensitivity to the power of language to love, to deceive, to promise, to kill? Kitamura pulls us through a rising panic of hyper-awareness until the story’s fever finally breaks with a note of hope and relief. But that can’t quell the novel’s reverberations, which expose something incomprehensible about the moral dimensions of modern life." (Ron Charles, Washington Post)
“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)
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- Unabridged
-
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A man and a woman are seated next to each other on a plane. They get to talking - about their destination, their careers, their families. Grievances are aired, family tragedies discussed, marriages and divorces analyzed. An intimacy is established as two strangers contrast their own fictions about their lives. Outline is a novel in 10 conversations. Spare and stark, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing during one oppressively hot summer in Athens.
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Difficult and Better in Print
- By Nick O. on 07-18-23
By: Rachel Cusk
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An Artist of the Floating World
- By: Kazuo Ishiguro
- Narrated by: David Case
- Length: 6 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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This is the story of an artist as an aging man, struggling through the wreckage of Japan's World War II experience. Ishiguro's first novel.
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An incongruous reader
- By Emeritus on 11-03-17
By: Kazuo Ishiguro
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The Rich People Have Gone Away
- A Novel
- By: Regina Porter
- Narrated by: William DeMeritt, Shayna Small
- Length: 9 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Brooklyn, 2020. Theo Harper and his pregnant wife, Darla, head upstate to their summer cottage to wait out the lockdown. Not everyone in their upscale Park Slope building has this privilege: not Xavier, the teenager in the Cardi B T-shirt, nor Darla’s best friend, Ruby, and her partner, Katsumi, who stay behind to save their Michelin-starred restaurant. During an upstate hike on the aptly named Devil’s Path, Theo divulges a long-held secret—and when Darla disappears after the ensuing argument, he finds himself the prime suspect.
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descriptions of food
- By Lilly Daniel on 08-16-24
By: Regina Porter
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Death Takes Me
- A Novel
- By: Cristina Rivera Garza, Robin Myers - translator, Sarah Booker - translator
- Narrated by: Tony Chiroldes, Lee Osorio, Ines del Castillo, and others
- Length: 8 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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A professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a mutilated man in a dark alley and reports it to the police. When shown a crime scene photo, she finds a stark warning written in tiny print with coral nail polish on the brick wall beside the body: “Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert.”
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boring, long and tedious.
- By CONNIE WOODUL on 04-27-25
By: Cristina Rivera Garza, and others
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The Float Test
- A Novel
- By: Lynn Steger Strong
- Narrated by: Andi Arndt
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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The Kenner siblings are at odds. Jenn is a harried mom struggling under the weight of family obligations. Fred is a novelist who can’t write, maybe because she’s lost faith in storytelling itself. Jude is a recovering corporate lawyer with her own story to tell, and a grudge against her former favorite sister, Fred. George, the baby, is estranged from his wife and harboring both a secret about his former employer and an ill-advised crush on one of his sisters’ friends. Gathered after a major loss, each sibling needs the others more than ever—if only they could trust each other.
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Flesh
- A Novel
- By: David Szalay
- Narrated by: Daniel Weyman
- Length: 9 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Teenaged István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. Shy and new in town, he is a stranger to the social rituals practiced by his classmates and soon becomes isolated, with his neighbor—a married woman close to his mother’s age, whom he begrudgingly helps with errands—as his only companion. But as these periodical encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that István himself can barely understand, his life soon spirals out of control, ending in a violent accident that leaves a man dead.
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Everything
- By Amazon Customer on 04-06-25
By: David Szalay
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Glorious Exploits
- A Novel
- By: Ferdia Lennon
- Narrated by: Ferdia Lennon
- Length: 8 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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On the island of Sicily amid the Peloponnesian War, the Syracusans have figured out what to do with the surviving Athenians who had the gall to invade their city: they’ve herded the sorry prisoners of war into a rock quarry and left them to rot. Looking for a way to pass the time, Lampo and Gelon, two unemployed potters with a soft spot for poetry and drink, head down into the quarry to feed the Athenians if, and only if, they can manage a few choice lines from their great playwright Euripides. Before long, the two mates hatch a plan to direct a full-blown production of Medea.
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Funny, Touching, Historical fiction
- By David Spells on 04-16-24
By: Ferdia Lennon
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Deep Cuts
- A Novel
- By: Holly Brickley
- Narrated by: Jayme Mattler
- Length: 9 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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It’s a Friday night in a campus bar in Berkeley, fall of 2000, and Percy Marks is pontificating about music again. Hall and Oates is on the jukebox, and Percy—who has no talent for music, just lots of opinions about it—can’t stop herself from overanalyzing the song, indulging what she knows to be her most annoying habit. But something is different tonight. The guy beside her at the bar, fellow student Joe Morrow, is a songwriter. And he could listen to Percy talk all night. Joe asks Percy for feedback on one of his songs—and the results kick off a partnership that will span years.
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Music infuses every note of this book
- By meredith quill on 04-22-25
By: Holly Brickley
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Sorrow and Bliss
- A Novel
- By: Meg Mason
- Narrated by: Emilia Fox
- Length: 10 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Martha Friel just turned forty. Once, she worked at Vogue and planned to write a novel. Now, she creates internet content. She used to live in a pied-à-terre in Paris. Now she lives in a gated community in Oxford, the only person she knows without a PhD, a baby or both, in a house she hates but cannot bear to leave. But she must leave, now that her husband Patrick—the kind who cooks, throws her birthday parties, who loves her and has only ever wanted her to be happy—has just moved out.
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Very Disappointed -- 2.75 Stars
- By Sharlotte on 06-07-21
By: Meg Mason
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Fun for the Whole Family
- A Novel
- By: Jennifer E. Smith
- Narrated by: Lauren Graham
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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The four Endicott siblings—Gemma, Connor, Roddy, and Jude—were once inseparable, a bond created by the absence of their dazzling, mercurial mother, who would return for a few weeks each summer to whisk them off on sprawling road trips around the country. Decades later, the unthinkable has happened: the Endicotts haven’t spoken in years . . . until an out-of-the-blue text arrives from Jude, now a famous actress, summoning them to a small town in North Dakota.
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A heartwarming read!
- By Cori Corcoran on 05-05-25
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On the Calculation of Volume, Book I
- By: Solvej Balle
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Liang
- Length: 4 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Tara Selter, the heroine of On the Calculation of Volume, has involuntarily stepped off the train of time: in her world, November eighteenth repeats itself endlessly. We meet Tara on her 122nd November 18th: she no longer experiences the changes of days, weeks, months, or seasons. She finds herself in a lonely new reality without being able to explain why: how is it that she wakes every morning into the same day, knowing to the exact second when the blackbird will burst into song and when the rain will begin?
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The Perfect Book
- By Severian on 02-16-25
By: Solvej Balle
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Run for the Hills
- A Novel
- By: Kevin Wilson
- Narrated by: Marin Ireland
- Length: 7 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Ever since her dad left them twenty years ago, it’s just been Madeline Hill and her mom on their farm in Coalfield, Tennessee. While she sometimes admits it’s a bit lonely and a less exciting life than she imagined for herself, it’s mostly OK. Mostly. Then one day Reuben Hill pulls up in a PT Cruiser and informs Madeline that he believes she’s his half sister.
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What a road trip!
- By Julie Guilbert on 05-27-25
By: Kevin Wilson
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The Remains of the Day
- By: Kazuo Ishiguro
- Narrated by: Nicholas Guy Smith
- Length: 9 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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This is Kazuo Ishiguro's profoundly compelling portrait of a butler named Stevens. Stevens, at the end of three decades of service at Darlington Hall, spending a day on a country drive, embarks as well on a journey through the past in an effort to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving the "great gentleman," Lord Darlington. But lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington's "greatness," and much graver doubts about the nature of his own life.
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Beautiful and ever relevant
- By bbots on 07-04-20
By: Kazuo Ishiguro
Good Story - Tough Narration
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Pretty Good
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She was used and re-used and never seemed to recognize it.
Low connection
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At the same time, all this chilly detachment made it hard for me to care about any of the novel's three main storylines--the mugging of a bookstore owner, the trial of a corrupt leader, the narrator's relationship with a married man--or about the fate of the narrator herself. The result was impatience, a less acute form of boredom. I can see why the novel was praised, but am baffled as to why the NY Times considered it one of the year's five best novels.
Traci Kato-Kiriyama reads in an uninflected tone that is probably right for the narrator (impossible to imagine this read in a dramatic or expressive way) but that adds to the overall flatness.
Icy Intelligence
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Thrilling premise that falls short
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Interesting and relatively short
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Distracting to read, better on audible
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It seems to me it’s a book about a woman who is consistently out of her depth and all she wants is to settle in somewhere on solid ground.
The ending was very satisfying to me, unlike other reviewers. It made perfect sense for the evolution of the characters — though I’m not sure I’d be swayed as quickly as she was.
I also had a problem with the hard Gs of the narrator (brinG-inG) but luckily they were less noticeable after a little while.
Overall, I didn’t love it or hate it — but it wasn’t bad.
Not that bad.
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I loved Kitamura's writing, and the studied reflection she lent her protagonist on the intimacies of her work, social and love relationships. But the intimacies aren't just interpersonal, rather also with her sense of home in the city, her identity in the world at large, and with language, (See David Bellos' "Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything.")
I saw that some reviewers were unhappy with the narration, for what they described as its being monotonous. Similarly, readers noted the minimal punctuation in the printed book. I suggest that both are related to the protagonist's work as a court translator, in which she is expected to dryly convey the meaning of the speech, without adding any emotion of her own. I think Kato-Kiriyama struck the perfect balance in doing so in her narration.
Thank you, Yael, for this different reading experience.
Work-life balance of intimacies
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interesting book about a job I had never imagined
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