Audition for the Fox

Audition for the Fox is Martin Cahill's debut novel, a fantasy adventure about Nesi, a young woman with godly blood who has spent her life failing to win the patronage of one of the Ninety-Nine Pillars of Heaven — a requirement for leaving her temple home. After her ninety-sixth rejection, she makes a desperate, risky prayer to T'sidaan, the Fox of Tricks, one of the more unpredictable Pillars.

T'sidaan answers by throwing Nesi three hundred years into her homeland's past, to a time when it lies occupied by the brutal Wolfhounds of Zemin. To survive and change her fate, Nesi has to learn cunning and misdirection from the trickster god himself, working to reclaim a fortress from the exiled, disgraced hundredth Pillar known as the Wolf of the Hunt.

The novel blends time-travel fantasy with a coming-of-age story about an underachiever forced to grow into unexpected resourcefulness, and was a 2025 USA Today bestseller on release.