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A Novel
by Susanna Kwan
Book Reviewed by: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, ...
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
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
(734 words)
(Reviewed by Pei Chen).
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.
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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