Playworld

“Starting off 2025 with a novel this terrific gives me hope for the whole year . . . Playworld presents us with a story dipped in molten nostalgia and flecked with love and sorrow . . . A bildungsroman from which anger has been vented, and what’s left behind is redolent with insight, tenderness and forgiveness . . . The narrator’s voice is an extraordinary hybrid of a boy’s plaintive innocence and a man’s wry reflection . . . Somehow, Ross can recall high school with enough fidelity to re-create on the page that visceral feeling of utter bafflement at the behavior of adults. But nothing baffles Ross as a narrator. His powers of observation and sensation seem to invade every nook of these lives like the tentacles of some giant octopus with consciousness in every sucker . . . There’s not a dull line, and yet his prose doesn’t feel like a Christmas tree so freighted with baubles that the branches risk shearing off . . . Whatever past rough experiences Ross may be mining here, they’ve been compressed under the pressure of time and genius into a cluster of literary gems . . . Such is the stuff great novels are made on.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post (cover review)

“A gorgeous cat’s cradle of a book . . . [Ross’s] powers of observation and ironclad resistance to cliché yield perfect descriptions again and again . . . The swirling vapors of Holden Caulfield are present in Playworld, for sure, but also Lolita, Willy Loman, Garp. The novel is detailed, digressive, densely populated, dull at times (as life is) and capable of tracking the most minute shifts in emotional weather. It is the young and the restless, edging into the bold and the beautiful.” —Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times Book Review (cover review)

“Extraordinary . . . A beguiling ode to a lost era . . . Ross is so adept at world-building that we are seduced by his vision of the Big Apple as wholly enchanting and mystical . . . I didn’t want it to end. The story is so rich and filled with intriguing—if morally questionable—characters that it’s immersive. Line for line the book is a revelation.” —Leigh Haber, Los Angeles Times

“Charming…Affecting…[Ross] is a spry, funny, inventive writer…Another mark of the book’s freshness is that, even though it contains all the ingredients for a mopey story of formative traumas, Playworld never sheds its winsome optimism.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

“Engrossing . . . Things come to a head one fateful summer as, amid personal and family tumult, the maturing Griffin begins to inhabit his most important role: himself.” —The New Yorker

“Dazzling and endearing . . . Gorgeously textured and frequently very funny, [Playworld] revels in all the heady, scuzzy, confusing bits of coming of age.” —Vogue (“The Best Books of 2025”)

“[Playworld] is entirely original, elegantly raw, beautiful, and brave.” —Lorrie Moore, The Berlin Journal

“A marvel of language and characterization . . . Playworld conjures, in beautiful sentences, a bygone New York, when money and culture linked arms, recalling Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch and David Gilbert’s & Sons . . . [Ross’s] sharp prose fleshes out even minor figures, [and] erotic tensions keep the narrative taut, disquieting, off-balance.” —Hamilton Cain, The Boston Globe

“Best book I’ve read in the past year and maybe the past decade. It’s Salinger-meets-Donna-Tartt-meets-your-long-ago-crush-on-Shaun-Cassidy. . . . Eleven out of ten recommend.” —Elin Hilderbrand, bestselling author of Swan Song, on Instagram

“Ross artfully brings [1980s Manhattan] to life, capturing its seductive pull and the darker currents underneath . . . Playworld delivers a gripping coming-of-age tale, whilst offering a chance to reflect on the era’s lasting cultural mystique and the complexities of growing up in its shadow.” —Clementine Doyle, Women.com

“Playworld is a novel that is a time machine of a kind, if they were ever used to seek revelations. I was reintroduced to an American history I lived through, and so much of what I had never known I’d forgotten, so much of what I was never taught to fear—but perhaps should have been. This was not my story but I saw mine in it—a boy lost in the house of adulthood, trying to learn how to be one of the people he sees around him. Haunting, mesmerizing, provoking—this novel is a triumph.” —Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

“Playworld is an astonishing, immersive novel that deserves a place in the pantheon of Great New York Novels. I loved this book for its textures, its music, and its moral accounting of ordinary life and ordinary time. And the characters! What characters! This is a late-breaking classic and might very well be Ross’s masterpiece.” —Brandon Taylor, author of The Late Americans

“A wonderful, full-bodied, modern-yet-old-school novel that brings the New York City of the 1980s to vibrant life. Ross will make you laugh and break your heart. I haven’t felt this immersed in a work of fiction in a long time.” —Harlan Coben, author of Think Twice

“A modern masterpiece, sharp and breathtaking and wise. Griffin, the young man at the center of this vivid bildungsroman, is someone you’d follow forward and backward and anywhere—across the sweaty mats of the high schoolwrestling team into a steamed-up car for a wildly sexy and heartbreakingly human relationship with an older, married woman, and then into the glittering world of child acting. Remarkable.” —Lisa Taddeo, author of Three Women

“Compulsively readable.” —Publishers Weekly

“It’s difficult to overpraise Playworld’s tragicomic scope, dazzling ambition, categorical brilliance. Ross writes so close to the bone that I winced while reading. And while young Griffin is brutalized and betrayed by the adults putting him through his sentimental education, Playworld is never hopeless. It instead reinforces our faith in art, that it can make and save a life. I have not read a book this weighty and soulful since I put it down, and I doubt I will again.” —Stephanie Danler, author of Sweetbitter

“What do you say about a book this good? In its unsentimental scrutinizing of a boy put to use by the adults around him—the coach, the family friend, the family shrink—Playworld is a revelation. Griffin Hurt’s life is so real it glows.” —Matthew Klam, author of Who Is Rich?

“Few writers are blessed enough to write an untouchable book. Adam Ross is one of them. Set during a trickle-down 80s we are now ready to make sense of, Playworld will have you so convincingly wrapped up in young Griffin’s world of romance and anxiety that you will pine for lost days. Patient, propulsive, spooled with Nabokovian detail, this novel broke open my heart’s floodgates in the way that the best literature does.” —Sidik Fofana, author of Stories from the Tenants Downstairs

“Playworld just about tore my heart out. In this novel about a child actor, it’s tough to know who’s doing most of the acting, young Griffin, the protagonist, or the adults who surround him and seem determined to break him to pieces. This is a big book, one about growing up. By the time I finished, I felt like I’d also done some growing up alongside Griffin. Adam Ross is a hell of a talent.” —Elliot Ackerman, author of Dark at the Crossing

“Playworld is the story not so much of a sentimental education as a plunge into the deep end of adulthood. Adam Ross has given us a masterful novel, one that deftly sets Griffin Hurt’s coming of age amid the rise of Reagan and the get-mine-first ethos that would come to characterize so much of American life in the coming decades. This novel is, in short, the world in full, and flat-out brilliant on every page.” —Ben Fountain, author of Devil Makes Three

“Griffin Hurt is a teenage narrator as fully realized and fumbling for meaning as William Styron’s ever-searching Stingo, and is destined to become one of the twenty-first century’s most beloved protagonists. You don’t just fall in love with him, you’re transformed into a kind of devoted surrogate parent. Playworld is a marvel.” —Hannah Pittard, author of Listen to Me

“In this magnificent novel, Adam Ross pulls off a literary hat trick: Playworld is at once an elegy for a very particular time and place, an intimate portrait of one family that then sweeps the reader into a multitude of fascinating worlds, and a tour-de-force of a coming of age story with an unforgettable boy at its center. I loved it.” —Dani Shapiro, author of Signal Fires

“Mr. Ross recreates the intensity of the era, dirty and magical, as it was back then through Griffin’s experience: kids at Dorrian’s and Studio 54, subway tokens, and graffiti everywhere. Izod shirts and Uber-free Hamptons. It’s just before AIDS, crack, and yuppies. On top of everything else, Playworld is a gift to anyone who remembers that time and place and a history lesson for those who missed out completely.” —Heidi Neurauter, The East Hampton Star

“Outstanding. . . . The gulf between what children perceive and what they can articulate forms the tragic core of Playworld. . . . Ross adeptly captures the texture of adolescence, the haphazard grasping toward a self that everyone undergoes on that circuitous journey to adulthood.” —Jonah Allon, The Metropolitan Review

“[Ross] knows how to use words, but he also knows how they fail us—and how devastating those failures can be.” —Alec Dent, The Bulwark

“An epic bildungsroman . . . While Griffin comes to understand the abuses inflicted on him, Ross’ novel is free of lessons, as unjudging as poor Griffin, who can do nothing but weather the loss of innocence we can all see overtaking him like a cloud. Ross offers surprising narrative flights, stunning passages, and a nostalgia-soaked setting in so-real-you’re there, bygone New York City.” —Annie Bostrom, Booklist

“The best American novel I’ve read in several years . . . A fascinating, thick, rich portrait of this country . . . Imagine if Catcher in the Rye were written by Holden Caulfield when he was sixty . . . A book I can’t recommend highly enough.” —John Podhoretz, The Commentary Magazine Podcast