Ply
A Novel
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- 10,99 €
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- 10,99 €
Publisher Description
"Ply is majestic. A cracked mirror world, a lot like ours; peopled by survivors, a lot like us; sentences so fine they break the skin; a plot that swerves through loss, love, trust, betrayal, art, science, society and control." —David Mitchell
“A testament to the surpassing importance of the human voice, artistic fecundity, improvisation, and ingenuity.” —Boston Globe
The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Trust turns to the future with a novel that examines the place of technology in the American imagination
Centuries from now, at the dawn of a historical epoch filled with both uncertainty and promise, an orphan is adrift in a city on the brink of a great transformation. The state has been dismantled, and humans are reinventing social bonds and learning new ways to coexist with nature. Following a childhood defined by loss, survival, and found family, the orphan grows up to become a “pincher,” someone who steals electricity from the grid to sell it on the black market. It’s a high-risk life, one that brings her into a rich art and music scene where she powers underground concerts. It also leads her to a colossal scientific invention that could change the very fabric of reality.
After rewriting America’s past with his two previous novels, Hernan Diaz defies expectations with his third and gives us a breathtaking glimpse into the future. A major achievement from a major contemporary writer, Ply questions the place of technology in the American experiment with a plot that grabs both heart and mind. It is a novel of ideas built from a story of people. Combining Dickensian odyssey, family drama, and scientific thriller, Ply poignantly charts the tenuous boundaries of selfhood and the distance that inevitably stands between us and those we love.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Pulitzer winner Hernan Diaz turns his formidable imagination toward the future in this audacious work of speculative fiction. Centuries from now, governments have vanished and corporations control necessities like water and electricity. An unnamed young woman survives as a “pincher,” siphoning electricity from the grid into portable batteries she sells on the black market, often to power the underground concerts she loves. But her unusual talent eventually attracts Pola, an eccentric physicist whose experiment might allow them to manipulate the very fabric of reality. Diaz makes this battered future startlingly vivid, filling its crumbling city with artists, scavengers, makeshift families, and people devising new ways to live together. And just as he played with narrative perspective in Trust, Diaz bends the form of this story, as Pola’s experiment begins raising head-spinning questions about time, identity, and the boundaries between people. Ambitious and oddly hopeful, Ply imagines the end of one world as the possibility of another.
