Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Playworld

Playworld

Ross, Adam

Paperback

Series: Vintage Contemporaries

RomanceGeneral FictionLiterary Fiction

Publisher Price: $20.00

ISBN10: 0345807006
ISBN13: 9780345807007
Publisher: Vintage
Published: Feb 24 2026
Pages: 528
Weight: 0.80
Height: 1.30 Width: 5.10 Depth: 7.90
Language: English
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 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.

Also from

Ross, Adam

View All

Also in

Literary Fiction

View All