Playground

by Richard Powers · 2024

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 BOOKER PRIZESHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 KIRKUS PRIZEFrom the Pulitzer Prize-winning and #1 internationally bestselling author of The Overstory comes an epic tale of love, friendship and humanity’s next great adventure.When two brilliant misfits bond at an elite Chicago private school—one a white legacy kid named Todd Keane and the other, Rafi Young, a Black scholarship student from the South Side—their friendship seems as boundary-breaking and limitless as the 3,000-year-old board game that brings them together. For a time, not even simultaneously falling in love with Ina Aroita, who grew up in naval bases across the Pacific, shakes them. Until finally it does, with a betrayal that launches all three of them on radically different paths. Rafi disappears into literature, and Ina into art. Todd, who once dreamed of escape into the world beneath the surface of the ocean, revealed to him by the legendary Canadian diver and marine biologist Evie Beaulieu, becomes instead one of the most powerful tech billionaires on the planet whose social media empire, Playground, is remaking the global order with its AI breakthroughs. But not even wild success can insulate Todd from mortality.