Playworld

A Novel

By: Adam Ross

Narrated by: Adam Ross

"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

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.

©2025 Adam Ross (P)2025 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"Starting off 2025 with a novel this terrific gives me hope for the whole year . . . Playworld presents us with a story dipped in molten nostalgia and flecked with love and sorrow . . . A bildungsroman from which anger has been vented, and what’s left behind is redolent with insight, tenderness and forgiveness . . . The narrator’s voice is an extraordinary hybrid of a boy’s plaintive innocence and a man’s wry reflection . . . Somehow, Ross can recall high school with enough fidelity to re-create on the page that visceral feeling of utter bafflement at the behavior of adults. But nothing baffles Ross as a narrator. His powers of observation and sensation seem to invade every nook of these lives like the tentacles of some giant octopus with consciousness in every sucker . . . There’s not a dull line, and yet his prose doesn’t feel like a Christmas tree so freighted with baubles that the branches risk shearing off . . . Whatever past rough experiences Ross may be mining here, they’ve been compressed under the pressure of time and genius into a cluster of literary gems . . . Such is the stuff great novels are made on."—Ron Charles, The Washington Post (cover review)

"A gorgeous cat's cradle of a book . . . [Ross's] powers of observation and ironclad resistance to cliché yield perfect descriptions again and again . . . The swirling vapors of Holden Caulfield are present in Playworld, for sure, but also Lolita, Willy Loman, Garp. The novel is detailed, digressive, densely populated, dull at times (as life is) and capable of tracking the most minute shifts in emotional weather. It is the young and the restless, edging into the bold and the beautiful."—Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times Book Review

"Extraordinary . . . A beguiling ode to a lost era . . . Ross is so adept at world-building that we are seduced by his vision of the Big Apple as wholly enchanting and mystical . . . I didn’t want it to end. The story is so rich and filled with intriguing—if morally questionable—characters that it’s immersive. Line for line the book is a revelation."—Leigh Haber, Los Angeles Times

I didn’t want it to end

The voice the story the vocabulary were all beautiful.
I was sad when it came to the end.

Read by the autor vs being performed

Unfortunately I have to return this after 1 hour. The author is reading the text without much inflection or change of voice for different characters. His reading just doesn't hold my attention.

Is it over yet?

I'll be quick, a mercy I wish the author has granted the reader. The book is similar to Catcher in the Rye in that nothing really happens. It's a cycle of various relationships, wrestling, and acting that go nowhere. But where Catcher in the Rye does us the kindness of being short, this book goes on forever. Having said that, it's well written. Just don't expect any of the myriad storylines to go anywhere. What really bothered me was the narration. The cadence of his voice irritated me so much I almost almost stopped listening several times. He tends to draw out his vowels at commas and periods, making him sound like a clichéd beat poet. I imagined him snapping his fingers and saying "Yeah" throughout. Drove me nuts.