Hernan Diaz’s third novel is coming later this year.
Riverhead will publish the author’s Ply in the fall, the press announced in a news release. It says that the novel “examines the place of technology in the American imagination.”
Diaz made his long-form fiction debut in 2017 with In the Distance, which followed a young immigrant from Sweden living in California in the Wild West era who tries to travel east in search of his brother. The novel was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award.
He followed that up five years later with Trust, about a wealthy New York couple in the early 20th century whose lives might not be quite what they seem. That novel, which is being adapted as a limited series by Todd Haynes for HBO, won the Kirkus Prize and the Pulitzer Prize (and brought together singer Dua Lipa and her fiancé, actor Callum Turner).
Ply will be set centuries into the future and will follow an orphan girl who makes a living stealing electricity from the power grid in order to sell it on the black market. She discovers an invention with the capacity to change the world.
“Combining Dickensian odyssey, family drama, and scientific thriller, Ply poignantly charts the tenuous boundaries of selfhood and the distance that inevitably stands between us and those we love,” Riverhead says.
Ply is scheduled for publication on Sept. 29.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
