“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”
— Albert Einstein
playground zero
a novel
Available now!
playground zero
a coming-of-age novel set in 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.
“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
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 Novel 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.
