Nothing to See

Buy Nothing to See together with Pip Adam’s 2023 novel, Audition, and receive a special discount. Find out more.

Peggy and Greta are trying to get sober. They know almost nothing about the world: how to cook, how to shop, how to find a job. To fill time, they sort clothes at the Salvation Army shop, and attend daily support meetings. They seem to have no identity of their own – or rather, they appear to have only one identity between the two of them. Then, without warning, one of them is gone, and the other is left alone, trying to find her place in the world. But is it Peggy or Greta who is left? Is it someone else altogether?

Nothing to See is grounded in the details of everyday life, of sharehouses and workplaces, of substance abuse and sex, and of the emergence of new technologies that fill every facet of existence. Yet the women at its centre seem on the brink of disappearing altogether. Set across three decades, Pip Adam’s enigmatic, uncanny novel asks what it means to seek relief from shame and loneliness, to find care when the fabric of reality is ready to come apart.

A total masterpiece. Gripping, weird, funny, close to the bone. An intense portrait of sobriety, a mystery, a sci-fi novel, an urgent book about living in our panoptical present.Dan Kois

Wildly good…a fiery study in class and addiction and the boring exhausting grind of building a splintered life into something whole.Catherine Woulfe, The Spinoff

A multifaceted and complex work…brilliantly written. Despite its difficult subject matter, it brings life and dignity to characters who feel they have none…[and] brings us a strong and clear literary vision of a world dominated by forces outside of our control. Pip Adam shows us what it is to fall apart and the cost of being reconstituted.
Australian Book Review