Excerpt from Awake in the Floating City by Susanna Kwan, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The streets ulcerated into potholes in the months that followed. A moonscape. A city on a sheet of Swiss cheese. Even roads built with self-healing asphalt couldn't withstand the deluge. Beneath the carpets of tar, the sand that held up the streets swept away in rivers of muck. Before it became futile, a contingent of concerned residents, the ones who appeared on local public broadcast feeds delivering grating, impassioned speeches on the neighborhood effects of this or that ordinance, organized to draw attention to the potholes. From the window where she'd set up her drafting table, Bo noticed the crude images, the kind found in high school bathroom stalls, drawn around the holes in spray paint. She began to work neon colors into her own paintings, using an airbrush. Then she watched as a crew of people—cloaked from the drizzle in rain ponchos, armed with bouquets and hand trowels—theatrically filled each new, still-small hole with potting soil and planted hibiscus blooms. She tried to track their campaign, searching community board posts for updates and staring down at the street each day. Finally, she was rewarded. When a particularly large pothole went untended by the municipality for over a year, they threw a birthday party for it, added streamers to the orange tape that bordered the current edges, dug forks into a cake piped in frosting. Alone in her apartment, watching through binoculars, she pounded her fist on the window and cheered along with them.

Excerpted from Awake in the Floating City by Susanna Kwan. Copyright © 2025 by Susanna Kwan. Excerpted by permission of Pantheon Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.