Playground

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