Ply

by Hernan Diaz

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.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction

464 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication September 29, 2026

About the author

Hernan Diaz is the Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times best-selling author of Trust. His first novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, won the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, was translated into more than twenty languages, and was one of Publishers Weekly’s Top 10 books of the year and Literary Hub’s twenty best novels of the decade. Trust, one of The New York Times’s 100 best Books of the Century, was translated into more than thirty languages, received the Kirkus Prize, was longlisted for the Booker Prize, and was named one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, and Time magazine, and it was one of The New Yorker’s 12 Essential Reads of the Year and one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year. Diaz’s work has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. He has received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a fellowship from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

Reviews

[Mohamed Ikhlef]

First few pages and I am sure this will be among the best novels I ever read!

[sami is losing her mind]

OH WE'RE SO BACK, BABY!

[Ryan Davison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Electricity is currency in Ply, and our central protagonist is an unnamed ‘pincher’ who charges fuel cells (known as bricks) by tapping illegal energy sources. She’s an innovative thief and develops a brick with much enhanced capacity, so her services are in high demand. Music is a major theme throughout, and the pincher sells bands the power they need to perform. In this energy starved dystopia, an electricity guzzling display equals more extravagance. Along with brew master partner, Reni,, the pincher has carved out a creative energy supplying/drink serving company called, the intentionally cheesy, Brix and Bricks. In a world where few reach the age of thirty, you get by however you can.

The book is set five hundred years in the future and described in dazzling detail with incredible steampunk imagery under a retro gloss of analog technology. Characters carry tablet-like devices called stells, accessing their personalized wiki-like file stores, and like time immemorial, gather around water stations to trade goods and share news. A defining event, known as 'The Suppression', occurred years previous, a dark day when citizen groups intended to storm the region's two major companies in control of water and energy. Corporate mutiny did not go as planned and the dissenters disappeared. Ply is the story of their children and grandchildren.

For every chapter in real time, we are given one of our unnamed narrator’s emotionally charged backstory. Her youth is filled with gadget lessons from her tinkerer mother who fixed and resold any item imaginable, and after an apprenticeship with a world class technical mind, the pincher grew from naturally gifted, to truly skilled. But developing an ingeniously improved power storing device leads our pincher to Pola, a physicist from The Great Lakes with unimaginable ambition, thrusting the plot in its intended direction.

Like Diaz’s previous novel, Trust, this prose is richly composed and surprising plotlines are cleverly embedded. When a character says their aim is to ‘unknit and reweave spacetime’, readers should expect grandiose developments. The world which serves as a backdrop to Ply is undeniably brilliant, and atmosphere overcomes brief sections that may feel like a university physics lecture. This novel's resounding finale will astound some, and provoke discussion in all. It's a pleasing experience that comes recommended.

While Ply’s themes are planted firmly in science, the environment is reminiscent of the glorious environment created by China Miéville's Perdido Street Station.

Thanks to Edelweiss+ and Riverhead Books for a review copy.