Audition

Shortlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize

Buy Audition together with Pip Adam’s 2021 novel, Nothing to See, and receive a special discount. Find out more.

A genre-bending novel from the winner of the Acorn Prize and the author of Nothing to See.

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 misrecognition, of disempowerment and underprivilege.

Pip Adam’s uncategorisable new novel, part science fiction, part social realism, asks what happens when systems of power decide someone takes up too much room – about how we imagine new forms of justice, and how we transcend the bodies and selves we are given. 

SHORTLISTED: Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction 2026
SHORTLISTED: Ockham New Zealand Book Awards – Fiction 2024
LONGLISTED: Dublin Literary Award 2025

Pip Adam is one of my favourite authors and Audition is my new favourite book. Hurtling through space and time with three giants who immediately gripped my heart is the place I want to be in literature. 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

I’ve never read anything like it. It’s part abolitionist indictment of the carceral system, part propulsive yet joyful linguistic tour de force… I’m always drawn to work driven by a political consciousness that doesn’t lose the unadulterated joy of language as material. I think that Pip is one of a handful of writers who consistently pulls off this difficult balancing act.
Kirsty Baker

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

Uncanny and astounding…in parts sci-fi, absurdist, fabulist, social realist…readers may find themselves equal parts unmoored and floored by this thrilling novel. I haven’t stopped thinking about it.
Deborah Crabtree, Books+Publishing

A blend of space opera and social realism, [Audition] is a fine example of Pip Adam’s ingenuity and imagination.
Angelique Kasmara, Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books

Audacious, inventive and radical… A fearsome intellect underpins Pip’s work, and Audition is threaded with astute psychological insights, but there is also absurdism and humour, erotica and brain candy, and pop culture references aplenty.
Sarah Laing, Newsroom

Adam’s genius is to balance the real and the unreal, holding them side by side so that their reflections glitter and shift… The best fiction makes reality mutable, makes the unthinkable possible. Adam has that power, and Audition brings that gift.
Jennifer Mills, Australian Book Review

Extraordinary…Adam expertly and surreally explores colonisation, power structures, free will and the consequences of taking up too much space. This is an astonishing novel by a brave and inventive author.
Danielle Bagnato, The Big Issue

Stunningly inventive… Though readers may find themselves challenged by this form – akin to Virginia Woolf’s The Waves meeting a 21st century version of Philip K. Dick – the rewards of a sustained read are abundant. Brilliantly weird. Weirdly brilliant.
Kirkus Reviews

Extraordinary, humane… Audition can be a caustic, biting book, full of insights into the many cages we construct for the unwanted. But the event horizon, which at first represents their permanent banishment, becomes a frontier of hope when they finally cross it.
Robert Rubsam, The Atlantic