Ply by Hernan Diaz

Centuries from now, an orphan adrift in an American city grows up to become a pincher - someone who steals electricity from the grid to sell it on the black market or, in her case, to power the underground music scene she adores. It is a high-risk life, and now she is being followed.

Soon, she is drawn into a paranoid maze where her closest friends and even her own identity are put into question - all while following a thread leading to a groundbreaking experiment that, if she can source the electricity to power it, could change the fabric of reality itself.

Set in a future filled with both uncertainty and promise, Ply is a powerfully humane novel that interrogates the role of technology in a deeply changed society.

Both an electrifying thriller and a profound novel of ideas, it offers a hopeful glimpse of a new world that may be growing out of the cracks and fissures we see all around us.