The New Animals

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. They are caught up in the small dramas of their lives, while around them the world is fast becoming uninhabitable. 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. "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