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Playworld
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Adam Ross
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By:
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Adam Ross
About this listen
"Starting off 2025 with a novel this terrific gives me hope for the whole year."—Ron Charles, The Washington Post
"A gorgeous cat's cradle of a book . . . The swirling vapors of Holden Caulfield are present in Playworld, for sure, but also Lolita, Willy Loman, Garp."—Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times Book Review
"Extraordinary . . . A beguiling ode to a lost era . . . Line for line the book is a revelation."—Leigh Haber, Los Angeles Times
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • A big and big-hearted novel—one enthralling, transformative year in the life of a child actor coming of age in a bygone Manhattan, from the critically acclaimed author of Mr. Peanut
“In the fall of 1980, when I was fourteen, a friend of my parents named Naomi Shah fell in love with me. She was thirty-six, a mother of two, and married to a wealthy man. Like so many things that happened to me that year, it didn’t seem strange at the time.”
Griffin Hurt is in over his head. Between his role as Peter Proton on the hit TV show The Nuclear Family and the pressure of high school at New York's elite Boyd Prep—along with the increasingly compromising demands of his wrestling coach—he's teetering on the edge of collapse.
Then comes Naomi Shah, twenty-two years Griffin’s senior. Unwilling to lay his burdens on his shrink—whom he shares with his father, mother, and younger brother, Oren—Griffin soon finds himself in the back of Naomi’s Mercedes sedan, again and again, confessing all to the one person who might do him the most harm.
Less a bildungsroman than a story of miseducation, Playworld is a novel of epic proportions, bursting with laughter and heartache. Adam Ross immerses us in the life of Griffin and his loving (yet disintegrating) family while seeming to evoke the entirety of Manhattan and the ethos of an era—with Jimmy Carter on his way out and a B-list celebrity named Ronald Reagan on his way in. Surrounded by adults who embody the age’s excesses—and who seem to care little about what their children are up to—Griffin is left to himself to find the line between youth and maturity, dependence and love, acting and truly grappling with life.
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Critic reviews
"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")
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What in the actual f@#k!
- By Booklover876🇯🇲 on 07-26-19
By: Rebecca Yarros
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Pretty Monster
- A Dark Stalker Romance
- By: Sheridan Anne
- Narrated by: Sierra Kline, C.J. Grey
- Length: 11 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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I'm addicted to my stalker. He watches me at night, sneaking in through my living room window and making my blood turn to ice. I feel him all around me as chills snake down my spine. Each night he becomes bolder, getting closer and welcoming himself into my bedroom, feeding his addiction.
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Adult Wattpad story
- By Colette Bryan on 01-22-25
By: Sheridan Anne
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Birthday Girl
- By: Penelope Douglas
- Narrated by: Andrew Eiden, Jennifer Mack
- Length: 13 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
We're not free to give into this. She's 19, and I'm 38. And I'm her boyfriend's father. Unfortunately, they both just moved into my house.
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Serious perfection
- By Misty Walker on 08-09-18
By: Penelope Douglas
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What a disappointment .
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A modern story of family, I’ll Come to You chronicles intersecting lives over the course of one year—1995—anchored by the anticipation and arrival of a child. With empathy, insight, and humor, Rebecca Kauffman explores overlapping narratives involving a couple whose struggle to become pregnant has both softened and hardened them; a woman whose husband of forty years has left her for reasons he’s unwilling to share and the man who is now attempting to woo her; and a couple in denial about a looming health crisis as well as their son who is fumbling toward middle age and can’t stop lying.
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What a disappointment .
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Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days. The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes.
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Growing up, May Hanover was a good girl, always. Well-behaved, top of her class, a compulsive rule-follower. Raised by a first-generation Chinese single mother with high expectations, May didn’t have room to slip up, let alone fail. Her friends didn’t call her the Little Sheriff for nothing. But even good girls have secrets. And regrets. When it comes to her friendship with Lauren and Kelsey, she's had her fair share of both.
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Irritating Narration
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The Unbecoming of Margaret Wolf
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Up-and-coming stage actress Margaret Shoard has just taken a bow as Lady Macbeth, the role she has always believed was destined for her. At home, she plays wife to her best friend Wesley, even if she doesn’t hold his sole attention romantically. After a public breakdown threatens all she holds dear, Margaret’s doctor prescribes her uppers—just a little help to get through the days.
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Unputdownable
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By: Isa Arsén
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How to Sleep at Night
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Meet Ethan and Gabe. A devoted couple for years, they have successful careers, an adorable daughter, and a house in the New Jersey suburbs. Sure, they may have drifted to different ends of the political spectrum, but their marriage still has its spark. Then one night Ethan makes an announcement: he wants to run for Congress as a Republican—but only if he has progressive Gabe’s blessing.
By: Elizabeth Harris
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The Heart of Winter
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Abe Winter and Ruth Warneke were never meant to be together—at least if you ask Ruth. Yet their catastrophic blind date in college evolved into a seventy-year marriage and a life on a farm on Bainbridge Island with their hens and beloved Labrador, Megs. Through the years, the Winters have fallen in and out of lockstep, and from their haunting losses and guarded secrets, a dependable partnership has been forged.
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The Acid Queen
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Rosemary Woodruff Leary has been known only as the wife of Timothy Leary, the Harvard professor-turned-psychedelic high priest, whose jailbreak captivated the counterculture and whose life on the run with Rosemary inflamed the government. But Rosemary was more than a mere accessory. She was a beatnik, a psychonaut, and a true believer who tested the limits of her mind and the expectations for women of her time.
By: Susannah Cahalan
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Gliff
- By: Ali Smith
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
An uncertain near-future. A story of new boundaries drawn between people daily. A not-very brave new world. Add two children. And a horse. From a Scottish word meaning a transient moment, a shock, a faint glimpse, Gliff explores how and why we endeavour to make a mark on the world. In a time when western industry wants to reduce us to algorithms and data—something easily categorizable and predictable—Smith shows us why our humanity, our individual complexities, matter more than ever.
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No other author comes close!
- By Franki on 02-08-25
By: Ali Smith
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All the Water in the World
- A Novel
- By: Eiren Caffall
- Narrated by: Eunice Wong
- Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
All the Water in the World is told in the voice of a girl gifted with a deep feeling for water. In the years after the glaciers melt, Nonie, her older sister and her parents and their researcher friends have stayed behind in an almost deserted New York City, creating a settlement on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History. The rule: Take from the exhibits only in dire need. They hunt and grow their food in Central Park as they work to save the collections of human history and science. When a superstorm breaches the city’s flood walls, Nonie and her family must escape north.
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A future world
- By AprilG on 01-24-25
By: Eiren Caffall
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In the Blink of an Eye
- A Novel
- By: Jo Callaghan
- Narrated by: Paul Mendez, Rose Akroyd
- Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Kat Frank knows all about loss. A widowed single mother, Kat is a cop who trusts her intuition. Picked to lead a pilot program that has her paired with Lock, an AIDE (Artificially Intelligent Detective Entity)—a hologram that is activated by a device on Kat’s wrist—Kat’s gut reactions about people and motives come up against Lock’s statistical calculations and data analysis that can be devised in seconds. But as the two missing person’s cold cases they are reviewing suddenly become active, Lock is the only one who can help when the case begins to target Kat personally.
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So glad this is a series
- By wisconsinclark on 09-14-24
By: Jo Callaghan
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Mountains of the Moon
- A Novel
- By: I. J. Kay
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Sastre
- Length: 10 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
After 10 years in a London prison, Louise Adler (Lulu) is released with only a new alias to rebuild her life. Working a series of dead-end jobs, she carries a past full of secrets: a childhood marked by the violence and madness of her parents,and a reckless adolescence. From abandoned psychiatric hospitals to Edwardian-themed casinos, from a brief first love to the company of criminals, Lulu has spent her youth in a shifting landscape of deceit and survival. But when she's awarded a settlement claim after prison, she travels to the landscape of her childhood imagination, the central African range known as the Mountains of the Moon.
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Wow!
- By Renee Ashley on 03-10-14
By: I. J. Kay
What listeners say about Playworld
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- L.K. Stewart
- 02-13-25
Nostalgic for a Gen Xer
Well developed story, filled with elements from my childhood. Listened to the author speak at a book club. He is well spoken and kind. Was happy to support him!
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- Brady9876543
- 01-14-25
Is it over yet?
I'll be quick, a mercy I wish the author has granted the reader. The book is similar to Catcher in the Rye in that nothing really happens. It's a cycle of various relationships, wrestling, and acting that go nowhere. But where Catcher in the Rye does us the kindness of being short, this book goes on forever. Having said that, it's well written. Just don't expect any of the myriad storylines to go anywhere. What really bothered me was the narration. The cadence of his voice irritated me so much I almost almost stopped listening several times. He tends to draw out his vowels at commas and periods, making him sound like a clichéd beat poet. I imagined him snapping his fingers and saying "Yeah" throughout. Drove me nuts.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 02-16-25
Enjoyable book marred by narration.
Adam Ross does his book no favors by narrating it himself. He has an unfortunate habit of turning simple sentences into two, three or four word phrases. It is a very annoying habit.
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- pinkie
- 01-24-25
I didn’t want it to end
The voice the story the vocabulary were all beautiful.
I was sad when it came to the end.
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- Possum Bean
- 01-10-25
Read by the autor vs being performed
Unfortunately I have to return this after 1 hour. The author is reading the text without much inflection or change of voice for different characters. His reading just doesn't hold my attention.
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1 person found this helpful
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Story
- Cathy Gilmer
- 02-16-25
Fun
What a fun book . It’s just stories . I loved the references . Laugh out loud funny .
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- Disillusioned
- 02-21-25
White Noise
This book seems to drone on and on and get nowhere. The preview makes it sound a lot more interesting than it is. Do I regret listening to it? No. It was filler. Mostly background noise with the occasional interesting aside but you soon realize the asides never go anywhere.
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