Awake in the Floating City - by Susanna Kwan (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Bo knows she should leave. Almost everyone else has fled San Francisco as years of rain drowned it. Her mother was carried away in a storm surge and ever since, Bo has been alone. Grief-stricken, an artist unable to make art, a daughter unable to give up the hope that her mother may still be alive. She half-heartedly allows her cousin to plan for her escape, but as the departure day approaches, she finds a note slipped under her door from Mia, an elderly woman who lives in her building and wants to hire Bo to be her caregiver. Suddenly, Bo has a reason to stay. Mia can be prickly, and yet still she and Bo forge a relationship deeper than any Bo has had with a client. Mia shares stories of her life that pull Bo back toward art, toward the practice she thought she'd abandoned. Listening to Mia, allowing her memories to swirl together with Bo's own, she's struck by how much history will be lost as the city gives way to water. Then Mia's health turns and Bo determines to honor their disappearing world and this woman who's brought her back to it, a project that teaches her the lessons that matter most: how to care, how to be present, how to commemorate a life and a place, soon to be lost forever"--

Book Synopsis

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK FROM PEOPLE MAGAZINE - An utterly transporting debut novel about the unexpected relationship between an artist and the 130-year-old woman she cares for--two of the last people living in a flooded San Francisco of the future, the home neither is ready to leave.

"An astonishing work of art...This is the kind of book that changes you, that leaves you seeing more vividly, and living more fully, in its wake." --Rachel Khong, author of Real Americans

Bo knows she should go. Years of rain have drowned the city and almost everyone else has fled. Her mother was carried away in a storm surge and ever since, Bo has been alone. She is stalled: an artist unable to make art, a daughter unable to give up the hope that her mother may still be alive. Half-heartedly, she allows her cousin to plan for her escape--but as the departure day approaches, she finds a note slipped under her door from Mia, an elderly woman who lives in her building and wants to hire Bo to be her caregiver. Suddenly, Bo has a reason to stay.

Mia can be prickly, and yet still she and Bo forge a connection deeper than any Bo has had with a client. Mia shares stories of her life that pull Bo back toward art, toward the practice she thought she'd abandoned. Listening to Mia, allowing her memories to become entangled with Bo's own, she's struck by how much history will be lost as the city gives way to water. Then Mia's health turns, and Bo determines to honor their disappearing world and this woman who's brought her back to it, a project that teaches her the lessons that matter most: how to care, how to be present, how to commemorate a life and a place, soon to be lost forever.

Review Quotes

A Best Book of the Spring from ELLE
A Best New Release of May from Alta

A Most Anticipated Book of the Year from People, San Francisco Chronicle, Electric Literature, Axios San Francisco, 7x7, and HeatMap

"The role of community during environmental disaster is one of the themes that runs through this thoughtful novel about art, creation and the ways we care for one another...Survivalists preparing for an imagined catastrophic future hoard food and supplies and stock up on guns to 'protect' themselves from those in need. But as Kwan shows, such visions of the future are the refractions of nihilism and the American belief that individual survival and success is due solely to individual effort. But that's never been the case. What preserves human life--even a life in horrific circumstances--are relationships of caring and cooperation. Community built on taking care of each other is the only way that we will thrive."
--Los Angeles Times

"Another strong addition to the library of fiction haunted by climate change. Susanna Kwan's debut novel ponders more than ecological uncertainty, though; it meditates on time and grief, the importance of making art, and the utter centrality of human relationships."
--Boston Globe

"[A] tender, speculative novel that imagines [Kwan's] home city flooded and largely abandoned--and how two of its last remaining residents find unlikely connection in disaster."
--San Francisco Chronicle

"A kindred spirit with titles such as Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven...Kwan wields a mesmeric command over her language, and though this is a quiet, contemplative novel, it is a deeply rewarding one."
--ELLE

"Awake in the Floating City is an astonishing work of art, rich with attention, patience, and love: the rare elegy that hums with hope, and makes the strongest case I've ever read for remembering the people and places that matter to us. Kwan's prose pulses with uncommon attention to the natural world, attuned to both its beauty and devastation. This is the kind of book that changes you, that leaves you seeing more vividly, and living more fully, in its wake."
--Rachel Khong, author of Real Americans

"Attentive to the value of connection, Kwan's debut novel imagines an altered version of her native city, asking a poignant question: How can you leave after everything's gone?"
--Alta

"Ravishing."
--SF Gate

"A terrifically polished debut...Kwan paints an extraordinarily detailed and realistic picture of the way water purges the city of most of its inhabitants, its color and its identity...Thanks to her status as a long-term resident, Kwan's futuristic San Francisco is both recognizable and foreign...Awake in the Floating City is a deeply affecting sci-fi novel that unfolds like an intimate black box theater production. Its innovation lies in its ability to pare down. There is a single question animating and justifying Kwan's characters' actions, a question both urgent and perennial: 'Who knew how much longer all this would exist?' Years into the future, Kwan posits, when climate catastrophe has devolved and decayed everything around us, we will be all we have. We should care, her writing suggests, because care is all there is in the end."
--KQED's "The Do List"

"What book is like this? What post-apocalyptic vision dares be so gorgeous, lush, struck with humor and light, so warm and caring and care-taking? Luminous, wise, Susanna Kwan's story of a flooded future San Francisco expands the known world, making room within its unbearable devastation for beauty, compassion, and love. This book is a labor undertaken by an imagination able to mourn and celebrate in the same breath. An argument runs through it, like a bright live wire, that to attend to loss--to hold the dying world's hand and say, 'I'm here'--is a way to be fully alive. And so it is an argument for life."
--Meng Jin, author of Little Gods

"Kwan nimbly constructs a dystopic San Francisco populated by the leftover few. Impermanence is delicately threaded throughout--disappearing landscapes, buildings, landmarks, records, archives. But Kwan also deftly intertwines centuries of Asian-American history--the Chinese Exclusion Act, Angel Island, Executive Order 9066, ethnic studies, widespread anti-Asian hate--tracking the challenges of being repeatedly rejected, exoticized, misrepresented, othered...An atmospheric study of two untethered souls who find companionship and support in a not-too-distant San Francisco that's sinking into the rising waters."
--Shelf Awareness

"Marvelously graceful...While this gem sits firmly between the mushrooming genre of climate fiction and the more subdued melancholia of Station Eleven or The Dog Stars, it's very much its own creature, meditating with fresh eyes on the resilience of memory and the inevitability of time."
--Kirkus, starred review

"With a gentle poeticism, Awake in the Floating City explores the gifts and trials of an intergenerational friendship while also reminding us of the multitude of histories embedded in the land around us. For anyone whose past is populated with long-gone landmarks in altered landscapes, Awake in the Floating City will strike a resonant chord."
--BookPage

"A lyrical tale...In spare and sometimes enigmatic prose, Kwan offers weighty insights into the human condition...Readers of climate fiction such as Téa Obreht's The Morningside will find much to enjoy."
--Publishers Weekly

"Meditative and affecting...Quiet but powerful, this debut will stay with readers."
--Library Journal

"Bo and Mia's stories ask readers to see how grief, loss, and change affect people's decisions while also challenging them to look at climate change from a very personal perspective. Readers of Eric Barnes' Above the Either and Lily Brooks-Dalton's The Light Pirate will relish this thought-provoking debut."
--Booklist

About the Author

SUSANNA KWAN is an artist and writer from San Francisco. Awake in the Floating City is her first novel.