Longlisted for the booker prize 2024
By Richard Powers
A powerful new novel from the Pulitzer prize-winning and booker-shortlisted author of the Overstory and Bewilderment.
Rafi and Todd are two polar opposites at an elite high school where they bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game. It sets them up for life: Rafi will get lost in literature, while Todd’s work will lead to a startling artificial intelligence (AI) breakthrough.
Elsewhere, 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 in naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home.
The great adventure
All of these people meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, marked for humanity’s next great adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out into the open sea.
As the seasteaders close in, how will Evie play the ever-unfolding oceanic game? Will Ina engage in acts of destruction? Todd and Rafi, now estranged, still find themselves in competition: Todd unravels while working on an idea to redraw the boundaries of human immortality, while Rafi and the residents must decide if they will greenlight the new project on their shores and change their home forever.
Set in the world’s largest ocean, Playground explores that last wild place we have yet to colonise and interweaves profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity in a way only Richard Powers can.
About the author
Richard Powers is the bestselling author of Bewilderment, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; The Overstory, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and the William Dean Howells Medal, and a finalist for the Booker Prize; and The Echo Maker, winner of the National Book Award for Fiction.
Powers is also the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the Pushcart Prize, among other accolades.
- PUBLISHER | Penguin Random House SA |
- ISBN | 9781529154320 |
- Recommended Retail Price | R380.00 |
- Classification | Novel |
