****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 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.

Praise for Intimacies

“[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

"Intimacies is both sleekly gorgeous — those sentences — and psychologically unnerving. She’s an absolutely brilliant writer." —Julie Otsuka, New York Times Book Review

"A master of cool disquiet... Kitamura writes with forceful, direct prose that makes for a bracing read and leaves the reader mesmerized." —Lauren Mechling, Vogue

"[A] thriller of a novel.... In exploring how one’s proximity to power and violence can hold endless repercussions, Kitamura interrogates how our intimacies can change the course of our lives.” —Time

"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

"[A] gorgeous, destabilizing meditation on the power differentials built into language and the gradual distortions of our emotional allegiances.” —Raven Leilani, Vulture

"An amazing book, beautiful and captivating’" —Elif Shafak
 
"In spare and elegant prose, Kitamura limns  her unnamed protagonist's search for home and gifts us a powerful, beautiful book." —Chika Unigwe

“I love how Katie Kitamura can channel a mind.” —Ruth Ozeki, Observer UK, Best Books of the Year)

 “With Intimacies, Kitamura gives the question of how to voice someone else’s suffering a political urgency of the highest order.” —Jennifer Wilson, *The New Republic

• “The way I tore through this book like it was a sexy beach read instead of a piercing meditation on the way language moderates our perception of violence! . . . About once every two pages, Kitamura writes a phrase that feels like a key turning inside your body. And if all of this doesn’t sound immobilize-you-on-your-couch-turning-pages-level good, just know that Barack Obama named it one of his favorite books of the year." —Jenny Singer, *Glamour

• “Powerful, masterful…. One might call Kitamura one of the most talented thriller writers who doesn’t write thrillers, for her novels are tinged with menace and threat and dark alleys that seem primed for acts of violence. And yet, really, the artistry  . . . .  lies in the delicate ways in which characters continue on, persevere slightly better or slightly worse, and survive.” —Chris Bollen, Interview Magazine

  “Just under 250 pages but packs a powerful punch. Beautifully written and mysterious.” —Real Simple

  “[T]he book vibrates with tension. . . Kitamura’s prose is responsible for this effect — she writes like a concert violinist, with clarity and control and a sustained, uneasy high pitch.” —Steph Cha*, Los Angeles Times

• “Kitamura blends the personal and political in spare, elegant, inimitable prose. A standout novel, like nothing I’ve read before." —Kathryn Ma*, San Francisco Chronicle

• “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

  "Fans of sparse millennial tales: Run, don't walk.” —Entertainment Weekly

  “In her unforgettable 2017 *A Separ…