Pip Adam

A genre-defying novel--part science fiction, part social realism--from one of the most powerful voices in New Zealand literature today. 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 disempowerment. Pip Adam's transcendent new novel sets its eye firmly on our current justice system and asks what happens when those in power decide someone takes up too much room?

Winner of the 2018 Acorn Prize, New Zealand's highest fiction award, Pip Adam's The New Animals is a work of artistic ambition and political urgency. Set in the Auckland fashion scene in 2016, The New Animals moves over the course of one night through the hopes, misapprehensions, resentments, and regrets of a small group of fashion-industry workers, divided by generation and class. The young and rich act like nothing can touch them; the tired Gen-Xers feel forever adrift. On this particularly stressful night, hairdressers, patternmakers, stylists, and a makeup artist are tasked with preparing for a last-minute photoshoot without clothes or clear directions. Caught up in the small dramas of their lives, while around them the world is fast becoming uninhabitable, the group toils against the impossible pressure until one of them decides to break away. Like a twisted contemporary heir to Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, The New Animals is a brilliant and unforgettable dive beneath the surface of life, uncovering the common ground of humanity, as well as the common plight.

'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.' The spaceship Audition is hurtling towards an 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. So they talk, and as they do, Alba, Stanley, and Drew recover shared memories of the injustices faced back on Earth by their former selves. Or are they constructing those selves from memory-scripts that have been implanted in them? At once speculative and grimly realistic, formally experimental and politically urgent, Audition asks how we live with each other's violences, and what happens when systems of power decide someone takes up too much space.