Dorothy, a publishing project

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 story 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. As Dan Kois writes: “Trust me when I say you have no idea where this is novel is going.” 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.

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“The New Animals is a dark book. But far from being unlikeable, its characters are thrillingly and heartbreakingly alive. The book is a cry for human emotion where human emotions are constantly being wiped clean. For all our talk that we’re moving forward, or towards some brighter future, The New Animals suggests instead that we’re simply circling around until we get too tired to do anything more. It left me stunned and heartbroken.” Brannavan Gnanalingam, The Spinoff

“The New Animals is fiction that doesn’t sit still, that shifts and shimmers as you read. It is in equal measure steely and self-delighting; it has little mercy. . . . It is willing to leap into the surreal in order to capture the weird violence and strangeness of being alive in this post-colonial island nation in the 21st century.” Anna Smaill, NZ Listener

“Adam has written in brutal minimalist depth about prisoners in NZ jails getting hairsprayed and set on fire. About super-hetero NZ Army soldiers in post-demob orgies having complex bisexual epiphanies – on Bealey Ave, Christchurch. This is the woman who is making literature subversive fun in this country again.” Carl Shuker, The Spinoff