Playground
Longlisted for The Booker Prize 2024
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4.6 • 8 Ratings
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE
THE POWERFUL NEW NOVEL FROM THE PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING AND BOOKER-SHORTLISTED AUTHOR OF THE OVERSTORY AND BEWILDERMENT
‘Ascends to the plane of true, indisputable greatness' OBSERVER
'An ambitious, rapturous epic' GUARDIAN
‘Magisterial, moving and thought-provoking … a beautiful love letter to our oceans’ NEW SCIENTIST
Rafi and Todd are two polar opposites at an elite high school. As adults, Rafi gets lost in literature, while Todd’s enters the world of AI. Elsewhere, Evie sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool strapped to one of the world’s first aqualungs; Ina grows up in naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home.
All of these people meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, marked for humanity’s next great adventure.
Set in the world’s largest ocean, Playground interweaves profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity.
'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 live' PERCIVAL EVERETT
'Brilliant, captivating and important' ANDREA WULF
'An extraordinarily immersive journey through lives linked in mysterious ways - gripping, alarming and uplifting' EMMA DONOGHUE
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
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The divergent requirements of economy, technology and ecology twist and turn throughout Richard Powers’ haunting novel. As teens, Todd Keane and Rafi Young bonded over their shared passion for games. Decades later, Todd is a tech billionaire, while Rafi, married to their mutual college friend Ina Aroita, lives on the South Pacific island of Makatea, where the populace is faced with a business opportunity that might be impossible to pass up. With that friendship at the centre, Powers delivers a complex tale that incorporates AI, neocolonialism, climate change and numerous other big-ticket issues. The early revelation that Todd is suffering from a form of dementia casts doubt on his strands of narration. Meanwhile, the island setting allows for a deep dive into the dire oceanic ecological crisis, using prose that feels like a eulogy. Powers does a lot of juggling in Playground, and like someone twirling chainsaws, the controlled chaos is mesmerising.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pulitzer winner Powers (The Overstory) delivers an epic drama of AI, neocolonialism, and oceanography in this dazzling if somewhat disjointed novel set largely on the French Polynesian island of Makatea, where a mysterious American consortium plans to launch floating cities into the ocean. The story centers on three characters: Rafi Young, a former literature student from an abusive home in Chicago who has moved to Makatea with his wife; Rafi's onetime friend Todd Keane, the billionaire founder of a social media company and AI platform whose connection to the seasteading project is revealed later; and Evelyne Beaulieu, a Canadian marine biologist who has come to Makatea just as the island's residents must vote on whether to let the project proceed. For some Makateans, the seasteading initiative raises hopes of economic renewal; for others, it triggers fears of environmental destruction and a return to colonialist oppression. Powers's characters can be implausibly cerebral and pure of heart, and his narrative threads never fully cohere, but the elegance of his prose, the scope of his ambition, and the exacting reverence with which he writes about the imperiled natural world serve as reminders of why he ranks among America's foremost novelists. "The ocean absorbed all her hope and excitement," Powers writes of Evelyne, "into a place far larger than anything human." Readers will be awed.
