Play Things

Winner of the Somerset Maugham Award

The 27-year-old hero of Play Things recently graduated and landed a job at a top architectural firm, but, he says, "I got tired." Now he's dropped out, grown his hair out long and taken a job as a playleader at an adventure playground. But he quickly finds that the job isn't quite what he'd expected. The kids are violent thugs, even criminals, and the playground is a haven for thieves, perverts, and drug dealers. As the ineffectual playleader finds himself mixed up rather comically in their bizarre and dangerous schemes, it starts to look as though the summer will prove to be less about finding himself, and more about finding a way to survive....

Compellingly readable, very funny, and unexpectedly moving, Peter Prince's critically acclaimed first novel, Play Things (1972), won the prestigious Somerset Maugham Award. This edition, the first in nearly forty years, includes a new foreword by the author.

"An agreeably readable first novel . . . light-hearted throughout, and altogether the book is a promising beginning to Mr Prince's career as a novelist." - J. G. Farrell, The Listener

"Mr Prince is absolutely first class. His short book grips as a story . . . It's exciting, relevant, a whole-sale gift for the top-notch department." - Oswell Blakeston, Books and Bookmen

"[A] newcomer who looks worth watching . . . Prince contrives to make [his] hero entirely sympathetic . . . he creates an air of hope and human potential, and you feel a surge of sheer affection for this not-so-null figure." - The Guardian

Peter Prince is the author of the novels Play Things, which won the Somerset Maugham Award, and The Good Father, which was made into a film starring Anthony Hopkins. He has also written for the screen (The Hit, Waterland), and TV (the PBS/BBC series Oppenheimer and the BBC adaptation of Muriel Spark's Memento Mori). He lives in London.