Ply - Hernan Diaz

Pre-order. Published 24 September 2026 — we'll send your copy on publication day. Order now and we'll put one aside for you. Free UK delivery on orders over £20, or collect from the shop in Oxford's Covered Market.

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Ply is majestic . . . sentences so fine they break the skin; a plot that swerves through loss, love, trust, betrayal, art, science, society and control.' - David Mitchell, author of Cloud AtlasThese are the last moments of the world as it's always been known. Reality now begins anew. The internationally bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Trust turns to America's future with Ply. Centuries from now, an orphan adrift in an American city grows up to become a pincher - someone who steals electricity from the grid to sell it on the black market or, in her case, to power the underground music scene she adores. It is a high-risk life, and now she is being followed. Soon, she is drawn into a paranoid maze where her closest friends and even her own identity are put into question - all while following a thread leading to a groundbreaking experiment that, if she can source the electricity to power it, could change the fabric of reality itself. Set in a future filled with both uncertainty and promise, Ply is a powerfully humane novel that interrogates the role of technology in a deeply changed society. Both an electrifying thriller and a profound novel of ideas, it offers a hopeful glimpse of a new world that may be growing out of the cracks and fissures we see all around us. Readers are blown away by Ply:'It shook my soul the way only true art can''My favorite book of this year''What a phenomenal, ambitious novel''Rarely has a novel left me feeling that my relationship with the universe itself has subtly changed''A masterfully creative work of fiction''In my view, he is perhaps the most important novelist of this century'