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

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

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).