Audition - by Pip Adam (Paperback)

About the Book

"A genre-defying novel-part science fiction, part social realism-from one of the most powerful voices in New Zealand literature today. A spaceship called Audition is hurtling through the cosmos. Squashed immobile into its largest room are three giants: Alba, Stanley, and Drew. If they talk, the spaceship keeps moving; if they are silent, they resume growing. Talk they must, and as they do, Alba, Stanley, and Drew recover their shared memory of what has been done to their former selves-experiences of imprisonment, violence, and disempowerment. Pip Adam's transcendent new novel sets its eye firmly on our current justice system and asks what happens when those in power decide someone takes up too much room?"--

Book Synopsis

A genre-defying novel--part science fiction, part social realism--from one of the most powerful voices in New Zealand literature today.

A spaceship called Audition is hurtling through the cosmos. Squashed immobile into its largest room are three giants: Alba, Stanley, and Drew. If they talk, the spaceship keeps moving; if they are silent, they resume growing.

Talk they must, and as they do, Alba, Stanley, and Drew recover their shared memory of what has been done to their former selves--experiences of imprisonment, violence, and disempowerment.

Pip Adam's transcendent new novel sets its eye firmly on our current justice system and asks what happens when those in power decide someone takes up too much room?

Review Quotes

Praise for Audition

Finalist for the 2023 Ockham New Zealand Book Award for Fiction
Longlisted for the 2025 Dublin Literary Award
A Millions Most Anticipated Book of Spring 2025

"Extraordinary, humane . . . full of insights into the many cages we construct for the unwanted." --Robert Rubsam, The Atlantic

"Stunningly inventive. . . Virginia Woolf's The Waves meeting a 21st century version of Philip K. Dick. . . Brilliantly weird. Weirdly brilliant." --Kirkus, starred review

"Every now and then, you are lucky enough to come across a book so inventive, so thrillingly odd, that you struggle to stop thinking about it. Audition did that for me. . . . A profoundly moving journey through ideas of incarceration and isolation. Adam trusts her reader to spot the trail of clues she drops before revealing all, and it makes for an exhilarating time." --Sian Cain, The Guardian

"More than a narrative about survival in space, Audition interrogates the nature of justice and the mechanisms of control. An exhilarating read." --Shelf Unbound

"Boundless and mythic. . . . Adam's book should be read not as a call to escape or abandon, but as a reminder--and perhaps a way--to return." --Annie Delmedico, ZYZZYVA

"The provocative latest by New Zealander Adam combines science fiction with a treatise against carceral systems. This tale thrums with life." --Publishers Weekly

"Audition is a mesmerizing, endlessly inventive novel about brainwashing and captivity, knowledge and banishment. Deftly pivoting between whimsy and devastation, satire and fable, social critique and speculative ingenuity, Audition soars with its own ambitions, rejecting the prison of narrative to make space for something beyond hope." --Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Touching the Art

"A powerful work of social commentary, a bodily exploration and a feat of imagination, all written with Adam's trademark poise: this is the genre-bending book of the year." --Laura Jean McKay, author of Gunflower

"Audition is a strange and powerful book: Swiftian, Beckettian, a space adventure that is simultaneously a chilling allegory for the carceral state. I haven't been able to get its sounds and wild landscapes out of my head. Read it, and then go read everything Pip's done." --Danielle Dutton, author of Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other

About the Author

Pip Adam is the author of four novels: Audition (2023), Nothing to See (2020), The New Animals (2017), which won the Acorn Foundation Prize for Fiction, and I'm Working on a Building (2013); and the short story collection Everything We Hoped For (2010). She makes the Better off Read podcast where she talks with authors about writing and reading and lives in Wellington, Aotearoa (New Zealand).