Pulitzer winner Hernan Diaz turns to a drowned New York in Ply

Hernan Diaz, the Pulitzer prize-winning author of Trust, has set his new novel Ply in a decaying city that reads unmistakably as a version of New York several centuries into the future.

The Guardian's review, published 14 October 2026, notes that the time and location of the speculative epic are never spelled out — but the evidence points one way. A series of upheavals have depopulated what the reviewer calls this "shipwrecked world of dilapidated bygone grandeur."

What does Diaz's new book change?

The shift from Trust is stark. Diaz's previous novel narrated the biography of a successful financier from four different viewpoints. It probed memory, representation, fiction and, in the reviewer's words, "the fictitiousness of money." It won the Pulitzer prize and succeeded both critically and commercially.

Ply moves from money to ruin. The reviewer finds more than a flavour of JG Ballard's The Drowned World in the rewilded city, where lynx and deer stalk the streets and vegetation consumes the ruins:

"the downtown swamp where the blind limbs and tendrils of trees and climbers have been at work for ages pulling the last line of collapsing buildings down into the spongy soil under the water"

Somewhere beyond the city, a more technologically sophisticated life endures. Diaz signals this through three corporate powers:

• Flow, a monopolistic company controlling water
• Tensor, its counterpart controlling electricity
• CTS, a private security company with an unexplained acronym, which protects their interests and "holds a monopoly over monitoring and patrolling of the streets"

Where the book falls short

The review's verdict is measured. Shades of Ballard aside, it finds that big ideas and lengthy exposition crowd out the human drama. The novel's dry vision of far-future America delivers atmosphere and conceptual ambition, but the people inside it thin out under the weight of world-building.

That criticism lands harder given what Trust achieved. The earlier book made its ideas felt through four competing voices and the reader's own detective work. Ply, by contrast, spends its pages explaining a broken world rather than inhabiting it.

The companies are the tell. Flow, Tensor and CTS are named but not, on the review's account, dramatized — an unexplained acronym doing the work that Trust's four narrators once did. What is not said in the novel may be deliberate; what the review declines to say about plot or characters suggests there is little of either to report.

For Diaz, the stakes are reputation. A Pulitzer opens doors; a speculative follow-up tests whether a writer's formal invention survives a change of genre. The Guardian's review — cautious, admiring of the setting, cool on the execution — suggests readers will keep arguing over that question long after the book's publication.