Description
'Ply is majestic . . . sentences so fine they break the skin; a plot that swerves through loss, love, trust, betrayal, art, science, society and control.' - David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas
These are the last moments of the world as it's always been known. Reality now begins anew.
The internationally bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Trust turns to America's future with Ply.
Centuries from now, an orphan adrift in an American city grows up to become a pincher - someone who steals electricity from the grid to sell it on the black market or, in her case, to power the underground music scene she adores. It is a high-risk life, and now she is being followed.
Soon, she is drawn into a paranoid maze where her closest friends and even her own identity are put into question - all while following a thread leading to a groundbreaking experiment that, if she can source the electricity to power it, could change the fabric of reality itself.
Set in a future filled with both uncertainty and promise, Ply is a powerfully humane novel that interrogates the role of technology in a deeply changed society. Both an electrifying thriller and a profound novel of ideas, it offers a hopeful glimpse of a new world that may be growing out of the cracks and fissures we see all around us.
Readers are blown away by Ply:
'It shook my soul the way only true art can'
'My favorite book of this year'
'What a phenomenal, ambitious novel'
'Rarely has a novel left me feeling that my relationship with the universe itself has subtly changed'
'A masterfully creative work of fiction'
'In my view, he is perhaps the most important novelist of this century'
A wildly original futuristic thriller of mind-bending science and punk music, from Pulitzer-prize winning author Hernan Diaz.
About the Author
Hernan Diaz is the Sunday Times bestselling author of Trust, which won the Pulitzer Prize and was longlisted for the Booker Prize. It was named 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 Award, a Whiting Award, and a fellowship from the New York Public Library's Cullman Center. His work has been translated into thirty-seven languages. Ply is his third novel.
Reviews
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, author of Cloud Atlas
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)
A brainy, challenging, and engrossing trek into a battered but unbeaten future -- Kirkus (Starred Review)
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 -- Oprah Daily, The Best Books of Fall 2026
'Ply is both a touching story of a young woman's struggle to find security and peace . . . and a mind-bending reflection on the nature of time and space. Either story alone would be satisfying, but Diaz cleverly marries them in an intriguing union . . . Ply is a big, ambitious novel . . . Unquestionably the product of a fertile imaginative intelligence' -- Shelf Awareness
A writer of singular talent -- Chicago Review of Books on Trust
Fascinating . . . Unpredictable, clever and massively enjoyable -- The Sunday Times on Trust
Genius -- The Observer on Trust
There is a dazzling intelligence behind this novel, which challenges us to rethink everything we know both about the institutions on which nations are built and the narratives by which stories are told. Sly, sophisticated, insistently questioning, Diaz writes with assurance, determined to rob us of every certainty -- The 2022 Booker Prize judges on Trust
Glints with wonder and knowledge and mystery -- Rachel Kushner on Trust
What a radiant, profound and moving novel -- Lauren Groff on Trust
[A] complex and thrilling book . . . I was obsessed and you might just be too -- Dua Lipa on Trust
Book Information
ISBN 9781037407178
Author Hernan Diaz
Format Paperback
Page Count 464
Imprint Macmillan
Publisher Pan Macmillan
Weight(grams) 564g
Dimensions(mm) 236mm * 155mm * 39mm
