2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, Shortlist Jan Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction. A mind-melting, brutalist novel, skillfully told in a collage of science fiction, social realism, and romantic comedy.' —Ockham NZ Book Awards
Click here to visit the 2024 Ockhams Sampler with an extract & Judge's comment
NZ Listener Best Books of 2023
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's previous books are Nothing to See (2020), which was shortlisted for the Acorn Foundation Prize for Fiction, The New Animals (2017), which won the Acorn Foundation Prize for Fiction, I'm Working on a Building (2013), and the short story collection Everything We Hoped For (2010), which won the NZSA Hubert Church Best First Book Award for Fiction in 2011. Audition will be published in Australia by Giramondo and in the UK by Peninsula Press. Pip works at an access radio station which makes radio by, for and about communities not usually heard in mainstream media. She makes the Better off Read podcast.
Cover: Philip Kelly
Science fiction
Paperback
H: 210mm W: 138mm