Playground

By: Richard Powers

Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini, Eunice Wong, Kevin R. Free, Chris Janney, Pun Bandhu, Robin Siegerman

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 BOOKER PRIZE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 KIRKUS PRIZE

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning and #1 internationally bestselling author of The Overstory comes an epic tale of love, friendship and humanity’s next great adventure.

When two brilliant misfits bond at an elite Chicago private school—one a white legacy kid named Todd Keane and the other, Rafi Young, a Black scholarship student from the South Side—their friendship seems as boundary-breaking and limitless as the 3,000-year-old board game that brings them together. For a time, not even simultaneously falling in love with Ina Aroita, who grew up in naval bases across the Pacific, shakes them. Until finally it does, with a betrayal that launches all three of them on radically different paths.

Rafi disappears into literature, and Ina into art. Todd, who once dreamed of escape into the world beneath the surface of the ocean, revealed to him by the legendary Canadian diver and marine biologist Evie Beaulieu, becomes instead one of the most powerful tech billionaires on the planet whose social media empire, Playground, is remaking the global order with its AI breakthroughs. But not even wild success can insulate Todd from mortality. As illness eats away at the brain that built it all, he dreams of the life that could’ve been and the relationships he should never have let go.

Before Todd’s final act is up, past loves and present ambitions collide on the ravaged Polynesian island of Makatea, where an unnamed corporation hopes to build the first floating, autonomous city on the open sea. Traversing borders and oceans, connection and loss, ingenuity and transcendence, Playground brings to light the systems of competition, cooperation, commerce, exploration and love that tie the fates of unlikely humans together, in Richard Powers’ most transporting work of fiction yet.

©2024 Richard Powers (P)2024 Random House Canada

Critic reviews

“This is a challenging novel, fragmented but compelling, with fine writing on friendship and its loss and on the awe and delight the ocean inspires. Along with its environmental warnings, the book carries an intriguing look at the ways people and animals play, as in the boys’ competitive chess, the antics of manta rays, the allure of computer games, and what a meta-minded author might do with his readers. An engaging, eloquent message for this fragile planet.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“An epic drama of AI, neocolonialism, and oceanography . . . dazzling. . . . The elegance of [Powers’] prose, the scope of his ambition, and the exacting reverence with which he writes about the imperiled world serve as reminders of why he ranks among America’s foremost novelists. . . . Readers will be awed.” —Publishers Weekly

“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 alive." —Percival Everett, author of James

“An extraordinarily immersive journey through lives linked in mysterious ways—gripping, alarming, and uplifting.” —Emma Donoghue, author of Room

“Powers is a master of taking important topics of our times—from threats to our oceans and climate change to AI—and turning them into riveting and fiercely relevant books imbued with psychological insight and a deep awe for nature. This eloquent dance of the scientific and emotional makes him one of our finest storytellers. Playground is brilliant, captivating, and important—and the best book I’ve read this year.” —Andrea Wulf, author of The Invention of Nature