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  • Published: 5 August 2021
  • ISBN: 9781473572478
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240

Intimacies

A New York Times Top 10 Book of 2021




A 2021 pick for Barack Obama and the New York Times, Intimacies is a dazzling exploration of truth and power

'An incredible writer' Natalie Portman

'One of my favourite novels of the past few years' Caleb Azumah Nelson

'Captivating' Elif Shafak

'Charged with tension and power' Avni Doshi

'Simply stunning' Brandon Taylor

'Gorgeous' Raven Leilani

An interpreter has come to The Hague to escape New York and work at the International Court.

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.

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.

One of Barack Obama's Favourite 2021 Reads
A New York Times Top 10 Book of 2021

  • Published: 5 August 2021
  • ISBN: 9781473572478
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240

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Praise for 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

Kitamura writes with forceful, direct prose that makes for a bracing read and leaves the reader mesmerized.

Vogue *Best Books to Read in 2021*

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 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

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

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

An amazing book, beautiful and captivating.

Elif Shafak

Such a beauty - I love this book.

Evie Wyld

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

[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*

Mysterious and compelling

Jason Cowley, New Statesman, *Books of the Year*

Kitamura's...language is measured with extreme care, to maximise a sense of the complex, ambiguous and multiple... an effect that proves spellbinding.

New Statesman, *Books of the Year*

Intimacies... completely revamped the way I thought about fiction, What would it mean to write without all the tricks that a write can so easily hide behind?

Jessica Zhan Mei Yu, White Review

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

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

Intimacies is an existential thriller laced with tensions on both personal and political levels.

Bristol Mag

An elegant study of the rewards and dangers of intimacy... Kitamura's subtle and perceptive novel glitters with insight into language love and the way we interpret others

Daily Mail

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

Deft and sharply written, with a beautiful rhythm and clear voice, it's one of my favourite novels of the past few years.

Caleb Azumah Nelson, author of OPEN WATER, Observer, *Summer Reads of 2023*

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
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