Playground

A Novel

24 September 2024

Territory Rights — Worldwide including Singapore and Malaysia, but excluding the USA, Canada and the rest of the Commonwealth.

Richard Powers (Author)

Description

Longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize

Named a Best Book of 2024 So Far by The New Yorker and Vogue

A magisterial new novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning and best-selling author of The Overstory and Bewilderment

Four lives are drawn together in a sweeping, panoramic new novel from Richard Powers, showcasing the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Overstory at the height of his skills. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world’s first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane’s work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough.

They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorus once helped to feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity’s next adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island’s residents must vote to greenlight the project or turn the seasteaders away.

Set in the world’s largest ocean, this awe-filled book explores that last wild place we have yet to colonise in a still-unfolding oceanic game and interweaves beautiful writing, rich characterisation, profound themes of technology and the environment and a deep exploration of our shared humanity in a way only Richard Powers can.

Reviews

"A characterful, capacious and engaging novel, distilling subjects as diverse as oceanography, climate change, the legacies of colonialism and the arc of a lifelong friendship into an exhilaratingly entangled narrative in which Powers’ unparalleled gifts for revealing the magic and mystery of the natural world are on full display." — The 2024 Booker Prize Judges

"Prepare to be awed… A mind-blowing reflection on what it means to live on a dying planet… I wasn’t prepared for the astonishing resolution that Powers delivers. In the now-vast library of fiction and nonfiction books reminding us of the planet’s imperiled condition, I can’t think of another novel that treats the Earth’s plight with such an expansive and disorienting vision… Powers manages to entwine our longing for friendship, paradise and immortality with the algorithms of artificial intelligence that surpass all understanding." — Ron Charles, The Washington Post

"Ambitious, rapturous… A transcendentalist deep dive of a novel… What a lush, opaque world Powers conjures… A fabulous exploration." — Xan Brooks, Guardian

"History unspools in this luminous journey that interweaves a 3,000-year-old board game, AI and floating cities.…all-around delightful." — People

"Vivid and ambitious…a love letter to the natural world.…Playground is ravishing in its descriptions of an underwater universe as fragile as it is ancient and unyielding." — Taylor Antrim, Vogue