Not long after her father died, Katie Kitamura remembers hearing Charles Taylor speak.
She was driving on the Bay Bridge in California in 2009, and Taylor, the former president of Liberia, was on trial for war crimes at The Hague. She listened to him over the radio, his voice a simultaneously magnetic and monstrous force as he defended himself.
That memory is perhaps the simple answer to how and when Kitamura’s latest novel, "Intimacies,” began.