Audition
A Novel
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
Longlisted for the 2025 Dublin Literary Award
“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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The provocative latest by New Zealander Adam (The New Animals) combines science fiction with a treatise against carceral systems. The dialogue-driven narrative has the feel of improvisation as it follows passengers Drew, Stanley, and Alba aboard a spaceship called Audition, where they negotiate the cramped quarters and try to stay positive ("It would be better if we took a moment to be really grateful for this beautiful spacecraft which used to be so perfect for us. Which was built especially for us. When we got too big for Earth," says Stanley). It turns out the trio have grown to more than 18 feet tall while on board, and have discovered that the only way to stop their dangerous rate of growth is to continue talking. They reflect on their metamorphosis, which began in a vaguely described classroom where they prepared for their mission. Eventually, the reader learns that the classroom was not a nurturing environment but a prison, and the Audition constitutes the trio's punishment as it hurtles toward a black hole. Adam charms with her nonstop dialogue and her characters' determination to be hopeful. This ebullient tale thrums with life.
