Ply: A Novel by Hernan Diaz (Hardcover) (PREORDER)

Fiction - Literary - Friendship - Family Life

RELEASE DATE: 9/29/2026 (WILL SHIP DIRECTLY FROM OUR SUPPLIER'S WAREHOUSE)

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Trust turns to the future with a novel that examines the place of technology in the American imagination

Centuries from now, at the dawn of a historical epoch filled with both uncertainty and promise, an orphan is adrift in a city on the brink of a great transformation. The state has been dismantled, and humans are reinventing social bonds and learning new ways to coexist with nature. Following a childhood defined by loss, survival, and found family, the orphan grows up to become a “pincher,” someone who steals electricity from the grid to sell it on the black market. It’s a high-risk life, one that brings her into a rich downtown art and music scene where she powers underground concerts. It also leads her to a colossal scientific invention that could be either a contraption devised by a deranged mind or a machine that will change the very fabric of reality.

After rewriting America’s past with his two previous novels, Hernan Diaz now gives us a glimpse into the future. Ply questions the place of technology in the American experiment with a plot that grabs both heart and mind. It is a novel of ideas built from a story of people. Combining Dickensian odyssey, family drama, and scientific thriller, Ply poignantly charts the tenuous boundaries of selfhood and the distance that inevitably stands between us and those we love.

AUTHOR BIO: 

Hernan Diaz is the Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of Trust, 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 Prize, a Whiting Award, and a fellowship from the New York Public Library's Cullman Center. His work has been translated into thirty-seven languages.