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 Modernist ambition and contemporary 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 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 all around them the world is fast becoming unhabitable. Like a 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.