Awake in the Floating City

A Novel

De: Susanna Kwan

Narrado por: Catherine Ho

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK FROM PEOPLE MAGAZINE • 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.

"An astonishing work of art...This is the kind of book that changes you, that leaves you seeing more vividly, and living more fully, in its wake."—Rachel Khong, author of Real Americans

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.

©2025 Susanna Kwan (P)2025 Random House Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

A Most Anticipated Book of the Year from People, San Francisco Chronicle, Electric Literature, Axios San Francisco, 7x7, and HeatMap

"[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."—San Francisco Chronicle

"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, author of Real Americans

“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, author of Little Gods

Catherine Ho is my least favorite audio performer

She can ruin any book. For dialogue, she voices Mia like a loud, obnoxious man. For Bo, her voice is 50% quieter but is at least voiced ok. And then there's the bulk of the narration, in a breathy, soft, little girl voice. So she goes on my list of 2 female narrators I will never listen to again.

As for the story...well, I liked it well enough. I think had it not been for the cli-fi aspect, I would have been bored about half the time. Essentially this is a story about a younger women (Bo) who is a home health aid and takes care of Mia, who tells Bo (an artist who is so annoyingly hapless I couldn't stand it) the story of her life as she declines. If you stripped out anything dystopian, speculative, futuristic, cli-fi, the author wouldn't have to revise much. But I suppose it was what kept me hanging in there--and that it takes place in San Francisco and that the characters are Chinese added interest.

As usual, these days, I felt like this was way too long for what it was.