Awake in the Floating City

Longlisted for The Center for Fiction 2025 First Novel Prize

A Best Book of the Spring from ELLE
A Best New Release of May from Alta

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

“The role of community during environmental disaster is one of the themes that runs through this thoughtful novel about art, creation and the ways we care for one another…Survivalists preparing for an imagined catastrophic future hoard food and supplies and stock up on guns to ‘protect’ themselves from those in need. But as Kwan shows, such visions of the future are the refractions of nihilism and the American belief that individual survival and success is due solely to individual effort. But that’s never been the case. What preserves human life—even a life in horrific circumstances—are relationships of caring and cooperation. Community built on taking care of each other is the only way that we will thrive.”
—Los Angeles Times

“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.”
—Washington Post

“Ravishing.”
—SF Gate

“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

“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.”
—Boston Globe

“[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

“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.”
—ELLE

“Stunning…First, Kwan’s quiet and loving descriptions of a drowned San Francisco struck me; then, the way her tender prose cradles her yearning characters…A remarkably hopeful and gentle novel…This is Kwan’s genius, avoiding dystopian flourishes in favor of poignant character studies, allowing the reader to slip right into Bo and Mia’s days…Awake in the Floating City is for any reader who grapples with climate change fears, anyone who loves San Francisco, anybody who has been or will be a caregiver, and every person who feels their own experience echoing through Bo’s resilience.”
—Reactor Magazine


“The story of an artist-cum-carer could be written for modern-day San Francisco (and probably has). Setting it a few decades into the future, though, allows Kwan to demonstrate human resilience in the face of ever-more challenging circumstances. And not just resilience: compassion, creativity, love. Kwan brings her city and her characters to life with grace and beauty.”
—Locus Magazine

“Kwan’s debut novel is richly imagined, humanistic, and hopeful. Kwan writes with an artful poetry and the steeliness of historical prose. Awake in the Floating City celebrates community and human relationships, even given human limits. It focuses on the salutary and saving value of art for a community under siege and the greater publics beyond. The rain reads as a symbol of accelerated time and accelerated loss. Meanwhile, humanity strives to create lives above the waterline.”
—International Examiner

“A mesmerizing novel about the importance of remembrance…[A] gorgeous and moving story of human connection.”
—BookBrowse, five stars

“Attentive to the value of connection, Kwan’s debut novel imagines an altered version of her native city, asking a poignant question: How can you leave after everything’s gone?”
—Alta

“Have you ever read a book where you felt completely transported into its world? The pages before you disappear, as do the walls around you. Instead of your usual life, you’re there, with the characters, living in that curious world beside them. This is how I felt reading Susanna Kwan’s new debut novel, Awake in the Floating City. Her atmospheric and affecting writing paints a tragic and memorable portrait of a dying world. Whenever I returned to reading it, I felt myself merge back into its landscape as if I’d never left…In the vein of Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven…The backdrop of this novel is so compelling, as is Bo’s character journey.”
—Book Riot


“A beautiful paean to the resilience of people, and women in particular…Awake in the Floating City reminds readers to live in the now in order to save the later. It’s a brave novel with a lovely message.”
—Bookreporter

“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.”
—KQED’s “The Do List”

“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