Pulitzer Prize winner Hernan Diaz for Ply

Hernan Diaz is the Sunday Times bestselling author of Trust, which won the Pulitzer Prize and was longlisted for the Booker Prize. It was named one of The New York Times's 100 Best Books of the Century.

His previous novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Kirkus Award, a Whiting Award, and a fellowship from the New York Public Library's Cullman Center.

Now, Hernan joined us for Ply, a novel that examines the place of technology in our collective imagination.

Centuries from now, an orphan adrift in an American city grows up to become a pincher. Stealing electricity from the grid to power the vibrant downtown music scene she adores is a risky occupation, and the city she moves through can be dangerous. She is right to be wary.

But 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 scientific experiment that 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. A gripping quest for truth at the dawn of a new historical epoch, it offers us a deep dive into the burden of capitalism, while poignantly charting the boundaries of selfhood, and the distance that stands between us and those we love.