Playground

(Paperback)

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A new novel from the Booker-shortlisted author A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2024 THE POWERFUL NEW NOVEL FROM THE PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING AND BOOKER-SHORTLISTED AUTHOR OF THE OVERSTORY AND BEWILDERMENT 'Powerful, mesmerically beautiful' MAIL ON SUNDAY 'One long, clever magic trick' OBSERVER 'Magisterial, moving and thought-provoking ... a beautiful love letter to our oceans' NEW SCIENTIST Playground follows four lives - a pioneering marine biologist, a free-spirited artist, and two polar opposites whose boyhood bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game sends one into literature and the other onto an AI breakthrough. In the world's largest ocean, the four are reunited on a history-scarred French Polynesian island chosen as the site for seasteading - sending floating, autonomous cities into the open sea. Standing on the shores of the last wild place yet to be colonised, the residents must first vote to decide if their home will become the launchpad for humanity's next great adventure. Praise for Richard Powers- 'Powers has extraordinary gifts as a writer' GUARDIAN 'Impressively precise in its scientific conjectures, Bewilderment is no less rich or wise in its emotionality' OBSERVER 'He composes some of the most beautiful sentences I've ever read. I'm in awe of his talent' OPRAH WINFREY 'It is impossible to deny the importance of Powers's message' SUNDAY TIMES 'Refreshing, original and moving' EVENING STANDARD

Reviews

Powers is a master of taking important topics of our times from threats to our oceans and climate change to AI and turning them into riveting and fiercely relevant books imbued with psychological insight and a deep awe for nature. This eloquent dance of the scientific and emotional makes him one of our finest story tellers. PLAYGROUND is brilliant, captivating and important -- Andrea Wulf
Is there anything Richard Powers cannot write The world here is complete, seductive, and promising. The writing feels like the ocean. Vast, mysterious, deep and alive -- Percival Everett
An extraordinarily immersive journey through lives linked in mysterious ways - gripping, alarming and uplifting -- Emma Donoghue
This ambitious, rapturous Booker-longlisted epic explores life underwater, generative AI, climate crisis and the power of play * Guardian *
Playground ... isn't merely a great American novel, but a magnificent one * i Newspaper *
Along with its environmental warnings, the book carries an intriguing look at the ways people and animals play, as in the boys competitive chess, the antics of manta rays, the allure of computer games, and what a meta-minded author might do with his readers. An engaging, eloquent message for this fragile planet. * Kirkus starred review *
Magisterial, moving and thought-provoking ... a beautiful love letter to our oceans * New Scientist *
A work of imaginative skill that opens doors into an undersea future where human exceptionalism isn't taken for granted, and finds hope where other writers, and thinkers, would dwell in despair * The Daily Telegraph *
A compelling, eloquent love letter to what [Powers] calls this "fading" planet ... There is a lot going on in Playground, with reflections on power, nature and friendship in a book with well-drawn protagonists and graceful prose. It is a story that rewards a slow read for full immersement * Independent *
Powerful, mesmerically beautiful * Mail on Sunday *

Author Bio

Richard Powers has published fourteen novels. He is a MacArthur Fellow and received the National Book Award. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Overstory. He lives in the Great Smoky Mountains.