Books like Playground
Four strangers on a Pacific island confront their pasts and each other, and the ocean becomes a stage for Powers' latest meditation on human connection and ecological grief.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Playground
The Overstory
Nine Americans, among them an artist whose family has photographed the same chestnut tree for generations and a scientist who discovers that trees communicate, are drawn together by trees and into a last stand to save the old-growth forests.
Galatea 2.2
A novelist trains a neural network to pass the Turing test using his own literary works, and the AI's emergence mirrors his own midlife dissolution.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Two best friends and their creative partner build a video game empire, and the decades-long collaboration becomes a story about love, loss, and the art we leave behind.
The Mighty Red
In the Red River Valley of North Dakota in 2008, as the financial crisis hits, Kismet Poe, sixteen, is pursued by Gary Geist, the son of a rich sugar beet farmer, and the lives of her mother and a dozen neighbours are pulled along with them.
The Candy House
The companion to A Visit from the Goon Squad: a vast network of characters connected by technology, consciousness, and the question of what happens to the self when it's captured in data.
Culpability
When the family minivan, driving itself with seventeen-year-old Charlie behind the wheel, crashes during a trip, the Cassidy-Shaws have to decide who is to blame, while the mother, an expert on the ethics of artificial intelligence, keeps secrets of her own.
Shallows
In Angelus, a West Australian whaling town in its last season, Queenie Cookson joins the protesters against the whalers, while her husband Cleve reads the journals of her great-grandfather.
The Man with the Compound Eyes
As a vast island of rubbish crashes into the east coast of Taiwan, Alice, a grieving academic, meets Atile'i, a young man from a mythical island who arrived on it.
Freedom
A liberal Minnesota couple and the rock-musician friend who comes between them spend three decades disappointing each other in Bush-era America.
Wild Dark Shore
Dominic Salt and his three children are the last caretakers of Shearwater, a remote island near Antarctica that houses a vault of the world's seeds, and as the seas rise around them, a mysterious woman washes up on the shore.
Ishmael
A man answers a newspaper advertisement from a teacher seeking a pupil with an earnest desire to save the world, finds that the teacher is a gorilla, and listens as he explains, by question and answer, the story his culture has been living.
The Unseen World
A girl discovers her brilliant, reclusive father has been hiding a devastating secret, and the revelation reframes her entire childhood.