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WORK TITLE: Awake in the Floating City
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Female.
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Writer and artist. Dream Side, writing instructor.
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Susanna Kwan is a San Francisco-based writer and artist. Her creative efforts have been supported financially by a range of institutions, including Kundiman, Storyknife, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, and Vanderbilt University. Kwan serves as a writing instructor with the Dream Side.
Awake in the Floating City is Kwan’s debut novel. It is set in a near-future San Francisco, which faces regular flooding due to climate change. Bo is a painter who still believes that her mother somehow survived after being washed away by floodwaters several years earlier. She reluctantly agrees to join the rest of her family in Canada for her safety. However, a note left under her door requests that she stay and help care for centenarian Mia. While they have difficulty getting used to one another, the two form a deep bond as they insist that they will both remain in the beleaguered San Francisco. Mia’s stories of her past serve as inspiration for Bo’s creative endeavors. She uses Mia as her muse to depict various aspects of her past along with San Francisco before climate change altered its existence.
Writing in Washington Post Book World, Sarah Chihaya commented that the novel “is troubled by some of the same problems that plague many books about fictional artworks; describing a thing that is supposedly sublime is always difficult for the writer who sees it clearly in their mind’s eye and the reader, who cannot. Kwan, herself a visual artist, narrates Bo’s process with a combination of scrutiny and hand-waving … that I, a decidedly nonvisual person, found somewhat remote.” Chihaya pointed out that the novel offers “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.” In a review in Library Journal, Jennifer Renken lauded: “Quiet but powerful, this debut will stay with readers.” Renken also called the novel “a meditation on grief and loss.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor observed that the novel shows “what it means to see things through at the end of everything.” Writing on the KQED website, Naomi Elias concluded that “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.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 2025, review of Awake in the Floating City.
Library Journal, April 1, 2025, Jennifer Renken, review of Awake in the Floating City, p. 95.
Washington Post Book World, May 17, 2025, Sarah Chihaya, review of Awake in the Floating City.
ONLINE
KQED website, https://www.kqed.org/ (May 6, 2025), Naomi Elias, “In a Flooded Future San Francisco, Care Is All We Have.”
Susanna Kwan website, https://susannakwan.com (October 17, 2025).
Susanna Kwan is an artist and writer from San Francisco. Her work has been supported by fellowships from Kundiman, Storyknife, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, and Vanderbilt University. Awake in the Floating City is her first novel. She teaches writing with The Dream Side.
In a Flooded Future San Francisco, Care Is All We Have
Naomi Elias
May 6, 2025
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book cover collaged over image of waves in blue and green
Susanna Kwan's debut novel, published by Pantheon, is out May 13, 2025. (Photo by Matt Hardy; cover courtesy of Penguin Random House)
A woman packing up her life to escape the cataclysmic flooding and sinkholes that have rendered San Francisco “a city on a sheet of Swiss cheese” suddenly finds a note under her door. It bears three unignorable words: I need help.
This is the inciting spark of Susanna Kwan’s debut novel Awake in the Floating City. In it, Kwan imagines the city engulfed in flood water. Endlessly, suffocatingly wet. Most have fled or died. It is illogical, difficult, to remain, but the story revolves around two people who do: Bo, a struggling young artist; and Mia, her 130-year-old neighbor.
Awake in the Floating City is a terrifically polished debut and addition to the growing genre of climate fiction — contemporary creative works contending with the very real ways climate change has and will continue to alter the human landscape. Kwan, a third-generation San Franciscan, currently lives in the Richmond District. It was her hometown’s ancient and recent history of climate emergencies and natural disasters that provided welcome inspiration for her first novel.
“I was here for the recent wildfire seasons, the orange day, [and] even as a kid, there was a six or seven-year period of extreme drought. There was a big earthquake,” she recalls. “These big events affect everybody here and really shape the culture.”
woman in dark button-down shirt
Author Susanna Kwan. (Andria Lo)
This lived reality of calamity served as both fuel and research. “When I started the book, it seemed implausible that there would be years and years of rain,” says Kwan. “In the last few years, we’ve had these weird winter seasons [where] it seemed like it rained every single day for months on end.”
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Surprise! The Bay Area Has Been Getting Hammered With Floods Since 1862
Until, that is, she saw a drawing of Sacramento from the 1860s. “It was of the city underwater,” she remembers. “I learned there had been these precedents for these huge devastating storms where atmospheric rivers came for months and months and devastated a lot of places in California and beyond.”
This knowledge and experience, coupled with living through the 2010 Tennessee floods as a graduate student in Nashville, helped her imagine a future San Francisco that was plausibly deluged under unprecedented volumes of water.
In her book, the wetness impacts everything. The third floor of Bo and Mia’s building becomes the bottom floor. On the 100th floor there’s a community garden, and a rooftop economy starts up between buildings. Everyone has a city government-issued mycelium wall installed in their homes that they pluck and eat from for basic sustenance. Aquamation emerges as an alternative to cremation.
Lithograph of K Street in Sacramento depicting the Great Flood of 1862.
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. Days bleed into each other. In the absence of sunlight, the fresh yellow color of greenhouse-grown lemons becomes a rare spectacle. The devastation mutes ambient noise like “alarms, miscellaneous beeps, the calls of other species” that typically function as a city’s proof of life.
But Kwan also stresses the ways people necessarily and miraculously adapt post-collapse. Thanks to her status as a long-term resident, Kwan’s futuristic San Francisco is both recognizable and foreign. Her characters commiserate, snipe and aid each other in ways that feel like prescient missives from the future. In one scene Bo watches through binoculars as several people decide to throw a birthday party for a large untended pothole in the street. One year of it not being addressed by the municipal government, cue the streamers. It’s the kind of defiantly human scene one could imagine being virally shared on social media as hopecore content in dark times.
Throughout the book Kwan detangles the nuances of Bo’s decision to sacrifice her safe exit to do care work for a stranger, the selfless aspects of that impulse and the selfish ones. Bo is an incredibly complex character, frustratingly stubborn and yet noble. The note is an excuse not to leave, but it also gives her a clear purpose, something she hasn’t felt in her work and life since the floods. As the two women’s lives become entwined via the complex bond of carer and client, the friction and warmth that emerges powers the run-down world of the book.
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While Kwan was completing the book, her mother was in hospice care for nine months. The experience of caring for her during multiple health crises prompted deep reflection on the subject.
“Care work is very invisible,” Kwan notes. “This accepted labor that we’re all doing and not acknowledging or properly supporting [includes] people who are raising children, people who are caring for elders and neighbors, [or] doing all of those things at the same time.”
The way we overlook it is alarming, she points out, because “it’s what keeps society running.”
In addition to pulling from her own experience, Kwan found ample research material on the Instagram accounts of hospice nurses. “Some of them have these silly skits,” she explains. “I really liked the ones that reenact visions that people will have on their deathbed.”
But the real appeal for Kwan was the way the nurses are trying to normalize the process of dying by initiating frank discussion about care work and end-of-life realities.
Through the character of Mia — who represents a growing class of “supercentenarians” in the story — Kwan wrestles with the idea of living for too long. What might that mean for our bodies, our relationships, our sense of time? Mia’s own family has left; she only communicates with them via hologram messages. Meanwhile, Bo’s mother has gone missing. Caring for Mia offers her work and connection that keep her from lingering on that loss.
Within their contractual work relationship, a necessary companionship and proxy mother-daughter relationship sprout. Their dynamic — which bears a significant age and experience gap, with Bo on the cusp of her life and Mia nearing the end of hers — is so emotionally loaded it almost escapes definition.
Poetry of Angel Island Detainees Inspires Oakland Ballet Performance
Another strong strand braiding them together is Bo and Mia’s shared identities as Chinese American women, a cultural link which Kwan uses to call attention to the historical significance of Chinese immigrants to the Bay Area. “San Francisco is a really important place in Chinese American history and American history in general,” Kwan explains. “There’s the Gold Rush and the building of the railroads, and you look out into the Bay and Angel Island is right there in view.” When it was an immigration station, Angel Island was where many Chinese Americans’ stories in this country began, often with detainment.
When each woman looks out of her window she sees a different city, or a different version of the same city, overlaid with her own memories and experiences. Kwan poetically captures the way every city is layered in this way, with one person’s memories overlapping and sandwiching another’s in invisible, paper-thin layers. Kwan’s background as a visual artist bolsters her descriptive prowess. In a scene where Bo experiments with cyanotypes Kwan writes “indigo bled everywhere …milky shapes and textures glowed where the paper had been protected from light: cascades, smoke, comet tails, flecks dribbles, blasts, grit, lines as fine as fishbones, lines as sprawling as nerve branches, rain drawn by rain.”
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?”
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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.
Kwan, Susanna AWAKE IN THE FLOATING CITY Pantheon (Fiction None) $28.00 5, 13 ISBN: 9780593701409
In the last days of an American metropolis, a grieving artist finds purpose in preserving an elderly neighbor's legacy.
In her marvelously graceful debut, artist and writer Kwan looks to the future with an arc of emotions ranging from existential panic to quiet moments of hope. While this gem sits firmly between the mushrooming genre of climate fiction and the more subdued melancholia ofStation Eleven orThe Dog Stars, it's very much its own creature, meditating with fresh eyes on the resilience of memory and the inevitability of time. It's become an all-too-familiar scenario in novels likeThe Mars House andNew York 2140: Here San Francisco is the drowned world where life, against all odds, goes on for now. "Everyone wanted Bo to believe that there were better places out there, places that weren't under relentless threat," Kwan explains. "They called this city a death trap. But she knew the truth: it was terrible, sometimes, everywhere." Why Bo hasn't left, long after her mother disappeared and her remaining family fled to Vancouver, she keeps mostly to herself. "If I leave," she asks, "how can I be found?" Just as she's been convinced to finally abandon her home, she gets a note under her door from Mia, one of the holdout supercentenarians in her building, who needs home care. Even as Mia's health deteriorates, connecting with her brings Bo back to the world in the wake of her grief. With the help of Antonia, a resilient and determined librarian, and Eddie, a conservation biologist, Bo sets about composing a work of art that will layer her story on top of the places and history that made the city live and breathe. What might seem at first like sacrifice is really more like endurance--holding on tight because letting everything go means losing who we are.
What it means to see things through at the end of everything.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Kwan, Susanna: AWAKE IN THE FLOATING CITY." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A832991585/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9e2c514a. Accessed 21 Sept. 2025.
Kwan, Susanna. Awake in the Floating City. Pantheon. May 2025.320p. ISBN 9780593701409. $28. F
[DEBUT]
In Kwan's meditative and affecting first novel, a near-future San Francisco is plagued by flooding events. Bo, a painter and caregiver, continues to hold onto hope that her mother survived being washed away two years ago. Concerned about the city's deteriorating infrastructure, Bo hesitantly agrees to join what remains of her family in Canada, but then a note is slipped under her door, requesting her services. Bo abandons her plans to relocate and begins her tenure as caregiver to centenarian Mia. Their relationship is never easy, but a deep connection begins to grow between the two women, both of whom refuse to leave San Francisco behind. As Mia regales Bo with stories of her past, Bo's passion for art returns, and she longs to pay tribute to all 130 years of Mia's life in a memorial project, one that aims to capture both Mia and San Francisco as they were instead of as they are now. Kwan's work is a meditation on grief and loss, both of loved ones and of home, as well as on the purpose of art in the darkest of times. VERDICT Quiet but powerful, this debut will stay with readers. Recommended for general purchase, especially as a suggestion for book clubs.--Jennifer Renken
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Renken, Jennifer. "Kwan, Susanna. Awake in the Floating City." Library Journal, vol. 150, no. 4, Apr. 2025, p. 95. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A835171009/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=66784e5e. Accessed 21 Sept. 2025.
Bay Area rain has an insidious way of creeping into the bones - of people, of buildings. When I lived there, my bathroom maintained a clammy topicality, even in drought months. Once, a strip of paint and damp plaster peeled off the wall and exposed its innards, confirming my worst fear: that the whole house was largely glued together by black mold. There was an inevitably to it as sure as there was to the damp, the kind of ongoing apocalypse that you can only live with, never really prevent.
Susanna Kwan's debut novel, ǣAwake in the Floating City,ǥ envisions a near-future San Francisco in which climate change has rendered the rain permanent, and flooding and erosion have driven the city's dwindling population to its rooftops. This rough description left me with the false impression - or perhaps the stupidly optimistic expectation - that it would have a kind of apocalyptic adventure plot hiding inside. The novel tells the story of Bo, an artist unwilling to leave the waterlogged metropolis though everyone she cares for has gone, and who finds further reason to stay when she becomes the caregiver for Mia, a declining ǣsuperseniorǥ centenarian in her building.
This synopsis suggests neither that Mia or Bo will leave their home, nor that they will attempt to stop the slow destruction we know is coming for the world. Still, out of habit and perhaps wishful thinking, I supposed that it would at least cling to the shell of the postapocalyptic form, even if it also acknowledged the form's emptiness, the way that TȨa Obreht's ǣThe Morningsideǥ and Ling Ma's ǣSeveranceǥ do. The protagonists of those books put up a fight before slipping back into the realities of their destroyed worlds. Those novels masquerade as, respectively, a magical children's adventure and an escape from a zombie plague, but both are elegies at their hearts; to steal a phrase from a very Bay Area figure, poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, they are ǣpictures of the gone world.ǥ While it is too late in both to stop the apocalypses that have already started - I have referred elsewhere to ǣThe Morningsideǥ as a ǣmid-apocalypticǥ rather than ǣpostapocalypticǥ novel - we are still accustomed to the idea that there might be something like escape or resolution, some possibility of release.
Kwan refuses even the comfort of this fleeting consolation. There is the minor drama of whether Bo will stay in San Francisco with Mia as the woman and the city both approach their ends, or if she will accept a long-suffering cousin's help and flee to relative safety in Canada. Yet the main plot point isn't whether our protagonist will evade danger - there is no permanent escape from this disaster, only a series of managed retreats - but, rather, how she will memorialize Mia, and the world that once existed. The best she can do, ultimately, is a tribute that involves superimposing images of the past on the city itself with holographs, an artwork that may be as hard for Kwan's readers to grasp as it is for everyone who briefly sees it in the book, ephemeral and ghostly. There is a curious lack of tension in ǣAwake in the Floating Cityǥ that grows curiouser as the book goes on; we are always waiting for something to happen, for some event to shake up the foundations of Bo's world. Yet the only movement is the inexorable forward creep of time, of age, of water, of mold - and the yearning backward pull of memory, not quite strong enough to stop the decline or even delay it.
Bo's quest to craft a fitting memorial also asks how those of us whose family stories are immigrant stories can maintain or revive histories that are receding into the past. How do we hold onto cultures or traditions that we never truly grasped in the first place? Bo finds in Mia a connection to her own family's Chinese heritage, and the broader history of the Chinese in San Francisco, that becomes part of her project of memorializing both her elderly charge and the lost community Mia represents. It becomes clear that the novel's central conflict is that of making art: Will Bo find the right medium for this message of loving tribute before Mia dies?
ǣAwake in the Floating Cityǥ is troubled by some of the same problems that plague many books about fictional artworks; describing a thing that is supposedly sublime is always difficult for the writer who sees it clearly in their mind's eye and the reader, who cannot. Kwan, herself a visual artist, narrates Bo's process with a combination of scrutiny and hand-waving (a conveniently helpful librarian and a deus ex machina-like climate scientist help her out with the technical details) that I, a decidedly nonvisual person, found somewhat remote.
Nevertheless, 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. ǣAwake in the Floating Cityǥ 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.
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Sarah Chihaya is the author of ǣBibliophobia: A Memoirǥ and a co-author of ǣThe Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism.ǥ
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Awake in the Floating City
By Susanna Kwan
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 The Washington Post
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Chihaya, Sarah. "The ocean is swallowing San Francisco in this curious novel." Washington Post, 17 May 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A840273656/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d2a7e4d3. Accessed 21 Sept. 2025.