Ply cover art

Ply

a breathtaking story of America's future, from the winner of the Pulitzer Prize

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Ply

By: Hernan Diaz
Narrated by: Imani Jade Powers
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'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.

'Ply is a wild ride' - Service95
'I highly recommend [it]' - Sarah Jessica Parker
'Compulsively readable' - Oprah Daily


Readers are blown away by Ply:

'It shook my soul the way only true art can'
'My favorite book of this year'
'In my view, he is perhaps the most important novelist of this century'
'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'

(P)2026 Penguin Random House Audio
City Life Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Technothrillers Thriller & Suspense Urban World Literature
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Critic 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 (David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas)
Please, please, please put [Ply] on your list . . . I highly recommend [it] (Sarah Jessica Parker on Instagram)
An edgy, compelling novel by a writer full of invention (The i Paper)
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 fiercely intelligent look at the future of technology, climate and capitalism that will have you gripped – and while no one is judging, it might just be our favourite cover of the autumn (Elle, The Best New Books for Autumn 2026)
A page-turning, pleasurably disorienting, and deeply humane vision of a possible future
After diving into historical fiction with his last two novels, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Hernan Diaz brings his unparalleled writing [to] the future . . . [The protagonist’s] journey in [a] dystopian future reflects modern predicaments regarding technology, identity, and control (Harper's Bazaar)
Ply is a wild ride that ultimately asks what survives when everything around us has collapsed. Strap in! (Service95)
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