Playworld: A Novel [Paperback]

WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD PRIZE • 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

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORKER, NEW YORK TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, TOWN & COUNTRY, AND PEOPLE • GOTHAM BOOK PRIZE FINALIST • MULANEY READS BOOK CLUB PICK

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

“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—Griffin soon finds himself in the back of Naomi’s Mercedes sedan, again and again, confessing all to the one perlã7