BookBrowse Reviews Awake in the Floating City by Susanna Kwan

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A mesmerizing novel about the importance of remembrance and human connection when everything around you is drowning.

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Susanna Kwan's debut novel, Awake in the Floating City, is an ode to her hometown of San Francisco, nostalgic about the city's past and poignantly speculative of a post-apocalyptic future. Middle-aged painter Bo has lived her whole life in the city, which is now flooded and rainforest lush, forcing its denizens to ascend to the rooftops. Her only family left are her cousin and uncle, who fled to Canada years ago and are constantly trying to persuade her to join them. But Bo remembers walking along the streets of San Francisco as a child, before it became "a moonscape" of "streets ulcerated into potholes," before "streets transformed into rivers [that] blew out windows, tore doors from their frames," and refuses to leave.

She also remembers the storm and flash flood that swept away her mother—and countless others—one evening. It's been years since Bo's mother disappeared, but Bo cannot give up the hope that she's alive somewhere and that Bo may one day spot her along the rooftops. Bo hasn't painted since her mother vanished; instead, she drifts, depressed, through her days, thinking about how in "the scheme of things, she was close to nothing." "Nothing I made had any meaning," she says.

Then, Bo's 130-year-old neighbor Mia, her health failing, hires Bo as a caregiver. When Bo begins clearing out Mia's closet to make room for her wheelchair, she finds a lifetime of items stored away, clues to the various lives Mia has led: village girl, fortune teller, entrepreneur, mother, housewife, matriarch, retiree. Each item represents a memory that Mia shares with Bo: a gold dress, her fiftieth wedding anniversary celebration with her deceased husband; her I Ching sticks, how she made her living during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Bo is moved by Mia's stories but also disheartened by how a memory can be flattened into one simple item, by how a lifetime can fit into a forgotten closet. Inspired, she decides to create a memorial for Mia, one that celebrates her legacy and the history of San Francisco.

The action of the novel takes place over about a year, but the history covered, through the characters' memories and through Bo's research into San Francisco for her memorial, spans centuries—Bo learns about the early Coast Miwok communities in California; Chinese immigration in the 19th century; and the 1906 earthquake that razed the city. And Mia's stories of her past—which, because the novel is set in a speculative future, take place in years that haven't happened yet for the reader—are based on true events, like the San Francisco controversy in which housing was built on top of radioactive waste left by Navy shipyards, leading to high cancer rates in certain neighborhoods.

Kwan is interested in both the experience of memory and its potential to shape the future. For example, Bo learns about photographer Arnold Genthe, whose images of post-earthquake Chinatown helped transform the neighborhood into a spectacle for tourists. And she beautifully describes the tender feeling of remembrance in this strange, alternative future:

"Everywhen. That's what an archaeologist studying aboriginal people in Australia had called it, that seamless melding of time... [like] when you felt a warm and familiar hand rest on your shoulder at the hole-in-the-wall Cantonese restaurant, and turned around, expecting an aunt or an old classmate, but there was no one, only the painted brick wall you leaned your back on. And here, now, they inhabited a place that seemed to have little memory of a time without precipitation and so harbored a sense of timelessness, or time so broad and long that it allowed other time to live inside it."

Awake in the Floating City is also attentive to the elusive process of artistic creation; Kwan describes the conception, research, experimentation, and redrafting of Bo's work, as well as the doubt that can often plague the creative process. Kwan's level of detail may seem excessive to those who are not interested in San Francisco or the visual arts. But the thematic core of her novel—the conviction that despite our transience in this world, life is still worth living, and that it is the job of those who are still alive and present to remember the past—is universal. Through caring for Mia, Bo is drawn out of her listlessness and isolation, and once again feels the urge to create and plan for the future, in this gorgeous and moving story of human connection.

This review first ran in the June 18, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.