“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
— William Faulkner
playground zero
a novel
Available now!
playground zero
a family's journey through 1960s Berkeley
1968 — Siren songs and loosened bonds. War, campaign slogans, and assassination. When the Raysons leave D.C. for the gathering anarchy of Berkeley, twelve-year-old Alice embraces the moment in America’s cultural ground zero. As family and school fade away in a tear gas fog, Alice feels an ambiguous freedom in the 1960s counterculture, following the Summer of Love. She must find her way through a new world where street signs hang backward and there’s a bootleg candy called Orange Sunshine.
“Like a trip through the Looking Glass, Sarah Relyea’s engrossing debut novel takes you by the hand back to the sixties, where social rules were being challenged and political upheaval was the norm.” — Patricia Hurtado, Brooklyn writer and journalist with Bloomberg News
“This intense retrospective on people yanked out of the strait-laced Fifties and tossed into a culture of anything goes will appeal to readers wanting to learn more about Berkeley’s days of rage.” — G. J. Berger, Historical Novel Society
“An eerily compelling déjà vu of the free, wild, and jeopardy-ridden kid scene in late-1960s Berkeley. Uncanny and powerful.” — Charles Degelman, Editor, Harvard Square Editions
“The characters were raw and complex.” — Amy’s Bookshelf Reviews
Sarah Relyea
Born in Washington, D.C., Sarah Relyea left the Berkeley counterculture at age thirteen and processed its effects as a teenager in suburban Los Angeles. She would soon swap California’s psychedelic scene to study English literature at Harvard. Sarah is the author of Playground Zero, a work of historical fiction, and Outsider Citizens: The Remaking of Postwar Identity in Wright, Beauvoir, and Baldwin. She remains bicoastal, living in Brooklyn and spending time on the Left Coast.
