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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?
"Stunningly inventive... Virginia Woolf's The Waves meeting a 21st century version of Philip K. Dick... Brilliantly weird. Weirdly brilliant." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"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
This information about Audition was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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).
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