Hernan Diaz follows his Pulitzer-winning Trust with a speculative novel set in a ruined future New York

Hernan Diaz, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2022 novel Trust, has published a new book called Ply, according to a review in The Guardian. Where Trust told the story of a financier through four shifting narrators, Ply moves into speculative territory: a decaying city, its time and place never named outright, that the reviewer takes to be a future version of New York several centuries from now.

The novel depicts a depopulated metropolis reclaimed by nature, described in the book, per the review, as a "shipwrecked world of dilapidated bygone grandeur," with lynx and deer moving through the streets and a downtown swamp where trees and vines pull collapsing buildings into the soil. The Guardian notes echoes of J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World in this vision of a rewilded city.

Beyond the ruined city, the review says, a more technologically advanced society persists, represented by two monopolistic companies: Flow, which controls water, and Tensor, which controls electricity. A private security firm called CTS — its acronym left unexplained — holds a monopoly on monitoring and patrolling the streets.

The Guardian's review judges that the novel's ideas and long passages of exposition crowd out its human drama, a verdict on execution rather than ambition. No French publication or translation of the book has been mentioned in the available material.