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Playground
by Richard Powers
Hutchinson Heinemann
Richard Powers – Pulitzer prize winner and twice Booker-shortlisted author – brings together four lives in a breathtaking, panoramic new novel with all the awe of a David Attenborough documentary: 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 high 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, if not frightening, AI breakthrough.
They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose rich 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 colonize in a still-unfolding oceanic game, and interweaves beautiful writing, rich characterization, profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity in a way only Richard Powers can.”
“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.”― Washington Post
“Ambitious, rapturous… A transcendentalist deep dive of a novel… What a lush, opaque world Powers conjures… A fabulous exploration.”― The Guardian
“Unexpected and genuinely fascinating… Ingenious tricks and clever devices abound in Powers’s fiction, but never before with the provocative implications of the turn in Playground.”
― Atlantic
“Richly hued… Gorgeous… No author has done more to turn our gaze outward to the mysteries of the universe, above our heads and below our feet.”― Boston Globe
“Brims with love for humanity and the planet.… [Powers] nimbly hopscotches between the wonders of nature and the marvels and dangers of cutting-edge science.”― NPR