Earthly Playing Field - (Nonaligned) by Radhika Singh (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A speculative novel of love and revolution set in a sci-fi present.

Roma has a steady job, a mortgage, and a surrogate family in Queens. But as she moves through her daily routines, the powerful Empire that rules her world bares its teeth elsewhere-crushing freedom movements across the planet, including the Punjabi farmers' uprising where her younger brother struggles on the frontlines.

Roma's life is upended when her older brother entrusts her with a strange gift: an ordinary-looking plant that manifests as a sophisticated bioengineered technology. The 'cell' opens a portal for an extraterrestrial spirit-body bearing news of a liberated future-and the potential to hack AI warfare-propelling Roma and her family into the core of a rising resistance.

As present and prophecy converge, Roma grapples with her troubled faith, ruminating on mystic poetics and anticolonial legacies while yearning for a bewitching woman whose heart will only ever belong to the revolution.

Review Quotes

"Defiant, compassionate and compulsively readable, Earthly Playing Field finds an exquisite balance between speculative fiction and urgent political insight. That Singh deftly brings this all together into a thrilling narrative is a resounding testament to this writer's striking talents." --Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King, shortlisted for the Booker Prize

"The novel of ideas is back and in spectacular shape. Radhika Singh crafts a rip-roaring adventure inside of a geopolitical graduate school seminar inside of a revolutionary handbook, wrapped in a tale of queer longing--a literary-Marxist turducken for the ages. This book makes you believe not only that the revolution is coming, but that it's winnable. Earthly Playing Field is a showcase of a radical and talented writer with a long and exciting career ahead of her." --Alejandro Varela, author of Middle Spoon

"Earthly Playing Field is not just a novel. It is a library of revolutionary possibility that meets us where we are and where we could be." --Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde

"One of the hallmarks of modernism was to separate the spiritual from the political. Given that the birth of modernism is deeply intertwined with colonialism, this separation also benefited the colonizers and the imperialists. In an act of resistance, Radhika Singh's Earthly Playing Field beautifully bridges this artificial divide between the spiritual and the political and highlights that one cannot exist without the other." --Haroon Khalid, author of Walking with Nanak

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"In beautiful, vivid prose, Singh creates a social, historical, and political tapestry that deftly undoes the tired common wisdom of our world. I haven't enjoyed a novel this much in a very long time." --Steven Salaita, author of Daughter, Son, Assassin and Jerry and Rodrigo Go to War

"This book set my heart on fire! Defiantly and deliciously romantic, Earthly Playing Field shakes the western literary construct of romance to give us something beyond the happily-ever-after: an ecstatic vision of Sufi love that amplifies our sense of possibility--of the world now and the world to come--with an ardent and transcendent yearning." --Joanna Lowell, author of A Shore Thing

About the Author

Radhika Singh is a writer and editor living in Queens, New York. Her fiction speculates on the presence of magic in this world, the connection to spirit and consciousness, and the power of the people to organize for collective liberation. Her novel Weirdly Tuned Antennae, winner of the 2025 Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest, is forthcoming from FC2 Press; an excerpt was featured in the 2024 Genre issue of The Markaz Review. Her comic Leila Khaled & the Struggle for Liberation, created in collaboration with illustrator Samita Chatterjee, appeared in the 2024 Trade/ Trade Off issue of Comixense magazine. For more information visit: rhsingh.work.