Ply - by Hernan Diaz (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

"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.

Review Quotes

Praise for Ply

"A page-turning, pleasurably disorienting, and deeply humane vision of a possible future."
--Vogue

"Offers us a vision of the future both deeply disconcerting and oddly exhilarating...a testament to the surpassing importance of the human voice, artistic fecundity, improvisation, and ingenuity."--Boston Globe

"With the transportive power of music, found families and trade-based economy, Ply resonates with the founding ideas of Burning Man. What if, despite everything, you could create a community that is wild and anarchic and free?"--Los Angeles Times

"Diaz is juggling an ambitious plot and thorny philosophical questions, yet the novel remains compulsively readable, carried along by intricate worldbuilding and strangely gorgeous evocations of ruin.... By the novel's end you will believe, like our heroine, 'that the cracks and fissures in every building and street [are] the sign of something wonderful hatching.'" --Oprah Daily

"[Ply] is preoccupied with many things at once: what people are made of, what society is made of, what the universe is made of." --The New Yorker

"Complex, compassionate and very punk, Hernan Diaz's Ply is an extraordinary science fiction novel, an optimistic story set in a very cynical future. --BookPage

"Bears a strong family resemblance to Diaz's two earlier books. The postmodern technical shenanigans are still there, the extensive engagement with the traditions of multiple literary genres, while smooth-as-silk prose and a compelling plot once again carry us through the metafictional minefield...These three novels can productively be read as a historical trilogy narrating the rise and fall of American capitalism."--Los Angeles Review of Books

"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. Blurbing Ply is like trying to blurb a dream." --David Mitchell

"To build a better world, how deeply must we get into the heads of the people around us? A brainy, challenging, and engrossing trek into a battered but unbeaten future." --Kirkus Review (STARRED REVIEW)

"Diaz brilliantly envisions how love, trust, and loyalty can remain when freedom and justice have collapsed and makes every page exhilarating and meaningful." --Library Journal (STARRED REVIEW)
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Praise for Trust

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY

"Intricate, cunning and consistently surprising . . . Diaz has the whole literary past at his fingertips." --The New York Times (10 Best Books of the Year)

"An elegant, irresistible puzzle." --The Washington Post (10 Best Books of the Year)

"With only his second novel, Diaz has become an ambitious and significant voice." --The Guardian (Best Books of the Year)

"Wondrous . . . Diaz is brilliant at dissecting literary conventions and transforming them into something new." --New York Review of Books

About the Author

Hernan Diaz is the Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of Trust, one of The New York Times's 100 Best Books of the Century. His previous novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Kirkus Prize, a Whiting Award, and a fellowship from the New York Public Library's Cullman Center. His work has been translated into thirty-seven languages.