Playground
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Playground
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See moreA 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
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9781804950821
Publisher: Cornerstone
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 30 September 2025
Country: United Kingdom
Imprint: Penguin (Cornerstone)
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 15.0mm
Width: 129.0mm
Height: 198.0mm
Weight: 200g
Pages: 288
About the Author
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.
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