Audition

Audition is hurtling through space towards the event horizon. Squashed immobile into its rooms 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 incarcerated former selves. Or are they constructing those selves from memory-scripts that have been implanted in them?

Part science fiction, part social realism, Audition asks what happens when systems of power decide someone takes up too much room – and about how we live with each other's violences – and imagines a new kind of justice.

Pip Adam is one of my favourite authors and Audition is my new favourite book... 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.

This is exciting and inventive writing in the hands of an extraordinary writer... Readers may find themselves equal parts unmoored and floored by this thrilling novel. I haven't stopped thinking about it. - Deborah Crabtree, Books+Publishing

Strange and wondrous and disquieting. - Sarah Laing, Newsroom

On one level, reading the strange and wonderful Audition is like listening to a concept album of experimental music that samples the familiar and turns it into the uncanny, where each track builds on the last until finally the listener floats off on an ecstatic bed of epic electonica. Rather than emulating what has gone before, it adds to a cumulative understanding of realms outside our ken, and asks us to critically examine our society – our systems, our prejudice, and our violence – by imagining worlds beyond our own. - Rachael King, NZ Listener

Audition is in the great tradition of Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo or The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares – brief books that carry the weight of much longer volumes and are at once hallucinogenic, convincingly imagined and demanding your attention. It loses nothing by comparison with its antecedents. - Paul Little, North and South

Profoundly anti-carceral, abundantly queer, and weird as fuck, Audition will lead you to spine-tingling places if you are willing to navigate its corridors. - Casey Lucas, bad apple

A fine example of Pip Adam's ingenuity and imagination... Adam's world-building is its own precisely constructed and glorious reimagining of our universe. - Angelique Kasmara, Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books

Adam has written not only an excellent book, but one of the most pointedly political acknowledgements that I have ever read. - Laura Borrowdale, Hokitika Guardian