Tattooed Bibliophiles | Audition

Audition

Author: Pip Adam
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Description

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?

Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction Shortlist 2026

Here’s the shortlist for this year:

  1. Audition by Pip Adam (Coffee House Press, June 10, 2025)
    • Three rom-com quoting MCs travel from incarceration to exile to a place beyond punishment. Audition explores carceral politics and the psychology of violence, and what healing from the harm of those systems might require in a world where embodiment and identity have lost all familiar forms.
  2. Sunward by William Alexander (Saga Press. Sept 16, 2025)
    • What if robots needed to be raised? Weaving comedy with a vision of parental care that encompasses beings built as well as born, Alexander considers caretaking and community alongside power and resistance.
  3. Call and Response by Christopher Caldwell(Neon Hemlock, Oct 14, 2025)
    • Caldwell's speculative and fantastical stories are grounded in the realities, dreams, struggles, and relationships that animate queer lives.
  4. Midnight Timetable by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur (Algonquin, Sept 4, 2025)
    • This novel in ghost stories gently suggests the degree to which humanity’s efforts to control the world are themselves figments and fantasies.
  5. The Works of Vermin by Hiron Ennes (Tor Books, Oct 14, 2025)
    • This story of revolution takes place in a city riddled with strange vermin, their exterminators, and a wealthy ruling class.
  6. Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman (Tor Books, April 15, 2025)
    • A multilayered, intimate history of two generations of trans characters in a distant future.
  7. Mad Sisters of Esi by Tashan Mehta (DAW Books, Sept 9, 2023)
    • Using myth, fictional scholarship, alchemy, folktales, and animism.
  8. One Message Remains by Premee Mohamed (Psychopomp, Feb 11, 2025)
    • Four loosely connected tales exploring life during wartime and occupation.
  9. Slow Gods by Claire North (Orbit, Nov 18, 2025)
    • A galaxy-spanning space opera exploring the fraught roles of power and love as a series of worlds face destruction.