Overview
"Starting off 2025 with a novel this terrific gives me hope for the whole year." --Ron Charles, The Washington Post "A gorgeous cat's cradle of a book . . . The swirling vapors of Holden Caulfield are present in Playworld, for sure, but also Lolita, Willy Loman, Garp." --Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times Book Review "Extraordinary . . . A beguiling ode to a lost era . . . Line for line the book is a revelation." --Leigh Haber, Los Angeles Times A MULANEY READS BOOK CLUB PICK - THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE - A big and big-hearted novel--one enthralling, transformative year in the life of a child actor coming of age in a bygone Manhattan, from the critically acclaimed author of Mr. Peanut "In the fall of 1980, when I was fourteen, a friend of my parents named Naomi Shah fell in love with me. She was thirty-six, a mother of two, and married to a wealthy man. Like so many things that happened to me that year, it didn't seem strange at the time." Griffin Hurt is in over his head. Between his role as Peter Proton on the hit TV show The Nuclear Family and 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 comes Naomi Shah, twenty-two years Griffin's 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 Naomi's Mercedes sedan, again and again, confessing all to the one person who might do him the most harm. Less a bildungsroman than a story of miseducation, Playworld is 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--with Jimmy Carter on his way out and a B-list celebrity named Ronald Reagan on his way in. Surrounded by adults who embody the age's 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.
Professional Reviews
" Playworld is a novel that is a time machine of a kind, if they were ever used to seek revelations. I was reintroduced to an American history I lived through, and so much of what I had never known I''d forgotten, so much of what I was never taught to fear--but perhaps should have been. This was not my story but I saw mine in it--a boy lost in the house of adulthood, trying to learn how to be one of the people he sees around him. Haunting, mesmerizing, provoking--this novel is a triumph."
-- Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
" Playworld is an astonishing, immersive novel that deserves a place in the pantheon of Great New York Novels. I loved this book for its textures, its music, and its moral accounting of ordinary life and ordinary time. And the characters! What characters! This is a late-breaking classic and might very well be Ross''s masterpiece."
-- Brandon Taylor, author of The Late Americans
"A wonderful, full-bodied, modern-yet-old-school novel that brings the New York City of the 1980s to vibrant life. Ross will make you laugh and break your heart. I haven''t felt this immersed in a work of fiction in a long time."
-- Harlan Coben, author of Think Twice
"A modern masterpiece, sharp and breathtaking and wise. Griffin, the young man at the center of this vivid bildungsroman, is someone you''d follow forward and backward and anywhere--across the sweaty mats of the high schoolwrestling team into a steamed-up car for a wildly sexy and heartbreakinglyhuman relationship with an older, married woman, and then into the glittering world of child acting. Remarkable."
-- Lisa Taddeo, author of Three Women
"Compulsively readable."
-- Publishers Weekly
"It''s difficult to overpraise Playworld ''s tragicomic scope, dazzling ambition,categorical brilliance. Ross writes so close to the bone that I winced while reading. And while young Griffin is brutalized and betrayed by the adults putting him through his sentimental education, Playworld is never hopeless. It instead reinforces our faith in art, that it can make and save a life. I have not read a book this weighty and soulful since I put it down, and I doubt I will again."
-- Stephanie Danler, author of Sweetbitter
"What do you say about a book this good? In its unsentimental scrutinizing of a boy put to use by the adults around him--the coach, the family friend, the family shrink-- Playworld is a revelation. Griffin Hurt''s life is so real it glows."
-- Matthew Klam, author of Who Is Rich?
"Few writers are blessed enough to write an untouchable book. Adam Ross is one of them. Set during a trickle-down 80s we are now ready to make sense of, Playworld will have you so convincingly wrapped up in young Griffin''s world of romance and anxiety that you will pine for lost days. Patient, propulsive, spooled with Nabokovian detail, this novel broke open my heart''s floodgates in the way that the best literature does."
-- Sidik Fofana, author of Stories from the Tenants Downstairs
" Playworld just about tore my heart out. In this novel about a child actor, it''s tough to know who''s doing most of the acting, young Griffin, the protagonist, or the adults who surround him and seem determined to break him to pieces. This is a big book, one about growing up. By the time I finished, I felt like I''d also done some growing up alongside Griffin. Adam Ross is a hell of a talent."
-- Elliot Ackerman, author of Dark at the Crossing
" Playworld is the story not so much of a sentimental education as a plunge into the deep end of adulthood. Adam Ross has given us a masterful novel, one that deftly sets Griffin Hurt''s coming of age amid the rise of Reagan and the get-mine-first ethos that would come to characterize so much of American life in the coming decades. This novel is, in short, the world in full, and flat-out brilliant on every page."
-- Ben Fountain, author of Devil Makes Three
"Griffin Hurt is a teenage narrator as fully realized and fumbling for meaning as William Styron''s ever-searching Stingo, and is destined to become one of the twenty-first century''s most beloved protagonists. You don''t just fall in love with him, you''re transformed into a kind of devoted surrogate parent. Playworld is a marvel."
-- Hannah Pittard, author of Listen to Me
"In this magnificent novel, Adam Ross pulls off a literary hat trick: Playworld is at once an elegy for a very particular time and place, an intimate portrait of one family that then sweeps the reader into a multitude of fascinating worlds, and a tour-de-force of a coming of age story with an unforgettable boy at its center. I loved it."
-- Dani Shapiro, author of Signal Fires
