Nothing To See

Shortlisted for the 2021 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction

It's 1994. Peggy & Greta are learning how to live sober. They go to meetings & they ring their support person, Diane. They have just enough money for one Tom Yum between them, but mostly they eat carrot sandwiches. They volunteer at the Salvation Army shop, & sometimes they sleep with men for money. They live with Heidi & Dell, who are also like them.

It's 2006. Peggy & Greta have two jobs: a job at a call centre, & a job as a moderator for a website. They're teaching themselves how to code. Heidi & Dell don't live together anymore, & Dell keeps getting into trouble. One day, Peggy & Greta turn around & there's only one of them.

It's 2018. Margaret lives next door to Heidi & her family. She has a job writing code that analyses data for a political organisation, & she's good at it. Every day she checks an obsolete cellphone she found under her bed, waiting for messages. She struggles to stay sober. Then, one day, there are two of them again, both trying to figure out where they have come from.

Nothing to See is a compelling, brilliantly original novel about life in the era of surveillance capitalism, when society prefers not to see those who are different, & the line between reality & simulation feels dissolvingly thin.

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'This is a total masterpiece. Gripping, weird, funny, close to the bone. An intense portrait of sobriety, a mystery, a sci-fi novel, an urgent book about living in our panoptical present. Somehow uses Rollercoaster Tycoon as a moving central metaphor.' —Dan Kois 

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Pip Adam is the author of 4 novels — Audition; Nothing to See; The New Animals, which won the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction; & I’m Working on a Building—& the short story collection Everything We Hoped For, which won the NZSA Hubert Church Best First Book Award for Fiction in 2011. Pip makes the “Better off Read” podcast.