Book info

• Title The Life Impossible
• Author Katie Kitamura
• Year 2025
• Genre Contemporary

One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. An exhilarating, destabilising novel that asks whether we ever really know the people we love. Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young – young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day – partner, parent, creator, muse – and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.

Thoughts

People have been raving about this book, so I was curious to see what it was all about. Having read it, honestly, I’m none the wiser. The style of writing is engrossing, you’re thrust into this world of stage and theatre and drama both on and off the boards. But the two halves of this story are deliberately but confusingly different, don’t really make any sense and don’t progress any sort of plot or story. Maybe I’m missing something because the people that love it really do, but I just didn’t get it.

Rating: 1 / 5