Awake in the Floating City

For fans of Station Eleven or Birnam Wood a literary novel with a dystopian world as its setting and at its heart is a human story about compassion in times of great adversity.  

In a future San Francisco transformed by years of rain, Bo, a 40-year-old lapsed artist, is grieving the community she’s lost to catastrophic flooding.  Her friends and family have disappeared or fled, the streets are rivers, and the buildings are falling apart.''  

Yet on the day of her planned departure, Bo finds a note slipped under her door: I need help, it reads. Three days a week, afternoons. Can pay in cash.   

Unable to bring herself to board the ship that could save her life, Bo instead chooses to answer the note, which turns out to have been written by her neighbour Mia, a 130-year-old ‘supercentenarian’ long abandoned by her own family.   
 


Genre: Science Fiction

"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

"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