Playworld 9781398559783 Paperback

A major literary achievementObserverRead it slowly and savour its memoirish richnessSunday TimesA sparkling, disturbing novel of a boy discovering himself and growing up amid self-preoccupied adultsThe HeraldSuch is the stuff great novels are made onWashington Post,10 Best Books of 2025Griffin Hurt is in over his head. Between his role as Peter Proton on the hit TV showThe Nuclear Familyand the pressure of high school at New York’s elite Boyd Prep – along with the increasingly compromising demands of his wrestling coach – he’s teetering on the edge of collapse.Then Griffin meets Naomi Shah, twenty-two years his senior. Unwilling to lay his burdens on his shrink – whom he shares with his father, mother, and younger brother, Oren – Griffin soon finds himself in the back of Naomis Mercedes sedan, again and again, confessing all to the one person who might do him the most harm.The story of a sentimental miseducation,Playworldis a novel of epic proportions, bursting with laughter and heartache. Adam Ross immerses us in the life of Griffin and his loving (yet disintegrating) family while seeming to evoke the entirety of Manhattan and the ethos of an era. Surrounded by adults who embody the ages excesses – and who seem to care little about what their children are up to – Griffin is left to himself to find the line between youth and maturity, dependence and love, acting and truly grappling with life.’A gorgeous cat’s cradle of a book’New York TimesExtraordinary I didnt want it to end. The story is so rich and filled with intriguing – if morally questionable – characters that its immersive This entire review could be made up of sentences I underlined for their beauty.Los Angeles TimesA marvelPlayworldconjures, in beautiful sentences, a bygone New York, when money and culture linked arms, recalling Donna TarttsThe GoldfinchBoston Globe