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
“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.”
—Shelf Awareness
“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.”
—Kirkus, starred review
"With a gentle poeticism, Awake in the Floating City explores the gifts and trials of an intergenerational friendship while also reminding us of the multitude of histories embedded in the land around us. For anyone whose past is populated with long-gone landmarks in altered landscapes, Awake in the Floating City will strike a resonant chord."
—BookPage
“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.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Meditative and affecting…Quiet but powerful, this debut will stay with readers.”
—Library Journal
“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.”
—Booklist
