"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.
