Final destination

Ingenious tale of three giants travelling through space explores how society treats those outside the mainstream.

-  RACHAEL KING

AUDITION, by Pip Adam (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $35) 

The night before I write this review, a new TV show catches my eye. I'm a Virgo features Cootie, a 19-year-old giant living in contemporary America. Hidden by his family, he longs for the outside world, but to keep him safe, his father has told him lies about what's beyond the front gate (that if young black men don't have jobs, they go straight to jail), and some truths (that being a giant will lead to him being treated like a freak, possibly killed for science).

It's a timely coincidence that Audition, Pip Adam's fourth novel, explores similar territory - using tropes from folklore to examine how society treats people who don't fit the mainstream idea of humanity. We've seen it in films like Ali Abbasi's Border, which drew on stories of trolls to comment on the refugee crisis, but also in Adam's own work, specifically the brilliant Nothing to See, in which women who have endured trauma and addiction became their own doppelgängers. In that novel, the world looked the other way rather than question why there were now two versions of the same person. Adam deals inventively in characters who don't fit the shapes society has cut out for them.