"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 A MULANEY READS
BOOK CLUB PICK • 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.
