Summary and Reviews of Awake in the Floating City by Susanna Kwan

Awake in the Floating City by Susanna Kwan

Awake in the Floating City

A Novel

by Susanna Kwan
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus (11):
  • Readers' Rating (16):
  • First Published:
  • May 13, 2025, 320 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

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.

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.

Excerpt
Awake in the Floating City

High up in Unit 7763, each night slid in like an oil spill, filling the hours with sludge and shine until it seeped into another day. Bo was carrying on a long solitude here, stranded in the studio apartment she rented, one island among hundreds in this building, in a city inundated by rain, so saturated it could be called drowned.

The rain had kept on for seven years. It slowed some days but never stopped. Overnight, it seemed, the city had transformed into a rainforest. Vines that ran from roof to ground sucked up the water and sent out shoots and tendrils. The skyline brightened from gunmetal to green, softening the sharp edges. A steward on Tamalpais, she imagined, must have seen the sudden verdant thumb of land to the south, dividing sea and bay. Below, streets transformed into rivers, and the rivers blew out windows, tore doors from their frames, widened into buildings through the new openings. The water took down statues and leveled groves, ...

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What are you reading this week? (6/5/2025)
...ali Deraniyagala about surviving the 2004 Tsunami in Sri Lanka, when all her family dies.Its a brave story of survival through immense grief Finished Awake in the Floating City by Susanna Kwan( thank you Book Browse). This is a dystopian novel set in a flooding San Francisco. An artist with no immediate family becomes caretaker for a 130 ye...
-Kathryn_Z


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Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

Kwan is interested in both the experience of memory and its potential to shape the future... 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... 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...continued

Full Review Members Only (734 words)

(Reviewed by Pei Chen).

Media Reviews

Elle
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.

Shelf Awareness
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.

KQED
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.

Boston Globe
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.

San Francisco Chronicle
[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.

Washington Post
The book asks haunting questions about the ability of art to contain or transmit memory. The results are also indicative of a turn away from solution-oriented speculative fiction toward a different kind of warning—of how we might live with an end that is already in progress. The question is still open for a dwindling time, of whether the rot is already in our bones or if we have the chance, maybe the will, to stop it. Awake in the Floating City doesn't offer resignation, exactly, but a preemptive mourning, as if to call attention to what we are in danger of losing by showing it in the process of being irrevocably lost.

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
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.

Booklist
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.

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

Publishers Weekly
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.

Author Blurb Rachel Khong, author of Real Americans
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.

Reader Reviews

Laurie M.

Awake in the Floating City - beautiful!
Susanna Kwan brings the reader to a future San Francisco which has been sieged with years of continuous rainfall. This dystopian setting gives the novel a unique atmospheric quality. The author's descriptive prose will make you feel like you are ...   Read More
Kathryn Z. (Brooklyn, NY)

Floating City
Though I am not a fan of dystopian books I thought this premise was beautifully written. It's a poignant story of list family, fading memories, stalked ambition revived by human connection. The main characters, Bo ,a young artist and Mia a 130( yes ...   Read More
Susan S. (Salida, CO)

Awake in the near future
Loved this one! Having lived in CA, I could instantly identify with location, politics, climate difficulties and more. The author put us in a not-far-distant future where all the current reality is suspended yet the people, their needs, their lives,...   Read More
Lauren C. (Los Angeles, CA)

Beautiful portrait of family, home, friendship, and art
I was expecting another post-apocalyptic book (which I enjoy), but this one was quite different. While it takes place in San Francisco where it has been raining for the past seven years, it isn't a survival story. The timeframe is a near future where...   Read More

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Beyond the Book



Community-Based Resources for Aging in Place

A woman looks at a phone with her granddaughter In Awake in the Floating City, Bo is an artist who supports herself by working as a caregiver to home-bound elderly clients. Remaining in one's own home, often living alone and having caregiver help, is referred to as "aging in place," and is frequently preferable to living in a nursing home or assisted living facility; according to the AARP, nearly 90 percent of adults over 65 want to remain in their current homes as they grow older.

The benefits of aging in place include things like maintaining one's independence; preserving familiarity and comfort; and being healthier and safer (with fewer people, there is less microbial spread for an already vulnerable population). Also, aging in place is less expensive than living in a facility.

...

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