Audition
A Novel
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize
Finalist for the Ockham New Zealand Book Award for Fiction Longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award
A Millions Most Anticipated Book
“Profoundly anti-carceral, abundantly queer, and weird as f*ck, Audition will lead you to spine-tingling places if you are willing to navigate its corridors.” —Casey Lucas, bad apple
The spaceship Audition is hurtling through the cosmos towards the event horizon. 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.
So they talk, 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.
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 cruelties, imagine new forms of justice, and transcend the bodies and selves we are given.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Some books are too genre-bending to easily classify and too brilliantly out there to fully explain. Audition is one of them. Nominally, it’s a novel about three giants: Alba, Stanley, and Drew. After growing so tall they’re deemed too big for their society (and failing out of programs designed to make them better fit in), they’re being forever exiled to a faraway planet on a spacecraft powered by their own speech. Author Pip Adam uses beautifully absurd scenarios and occasional trippy abstractions to get at some powerful ideas about structures of power, privilege, and violence. The trio’s story particularly reflects on the prison system, where those who transgress against society often receive treatment that only makes them bigger and bigger outcasts. And yet the three main characters here aren’t angels. As we learn their backstories, we discover the flaws and mistakes that make them compellingly human—or whatever the equivalent is in the world of this wonderfully bizarre read.
