Hernan Diaz’s novel Ply turns from the financial and narrative puzzles of Trust to a speculative city far in the future. The setting is not explicitly named, but the Guardian’s review reads its clues as pointing towards a transformed New York.
The city has been depleted by upheaval and partly reclaimed by nature, with animals and vegetation entering spaces once shaped by buildings. A more technologically developed society appears to exist beyond its boundaries.
The review compares the ruined urban landscape with earlier speculative fiction and examines how Diaz builds the relationship between memory and representation. These are critical interpretations, not explanations supplied by a news event, and the novel’s deliberately uncertain geography remains part of its imagined world.
