Fiction Reviews
Awake in the Floating City
(2025) Susanna Kwan, Simon & Schuster, £16.99, hrdbk, 311, ISBN 978-1-398-54335-5
In this debut novel, by Californian writer and artist Susanna Kwan, we find ourselves in a near-future flooded San Francisco, fallen victim to rising sea levels and climate change. The remaining residents eke out simple lives on the higher floors of apartment blocks, connected by rooftop bridges and sustained by high-rise farms. They either have no other place to go or are too stubborn to leave.
One member of this community in decline is Bo – a Chinese-American artist with a long-standing creative block. Not unconnected, she’s also mourning the death of the mother, lost in the floods that swept the city. Her remaining family would like her to leave San Francisco for the safety of Canada. Instead, she takes a job as a care worker for Mia, a cantankerous 130-something with a long and chequered past but no nearby relatives of her own.
Over the chapters that follow, her bond with Mia grows, even as the health of her supercentenarian charge declines. We learn how Mia survived World War Two and made it to the US, became a mother and then ultimately a great-great grandmother. We hear about her business adventures, her clandestine romances and her troubled relationship with her husband, all against the backdrop of San Francisco’s Chinatown and the evolution of the city’s Chinese community out and away from it.
In caring for Mia, Bo rediscovers her own passion for art and begins work on a memorial to commemorate her friend’s life. This begins as a simple portrait and ends as a multimedia extravaganza tracing one individual’s story within the history of a community and a city.
From time to time she also sees Eddie, a biological field researcher and friend with benefits, who helps her with her art but also takes her outside of her otherwise hermit-like existence.
To say ‘that’s it’ is to disregard the slow accretion of everyday details the book gives us of Bo, Mia and how their lives intertwine: cooking, cleaning, calls from Mia’s daughter all the way from Scandinavia, sorting through the artefacts of Mia’s life.
But, in another sense, that really is all there is to this book.
Relative lack of action aside, I did appreciate the gentleness of Awake In The Floating City. While the setting is a cosy catastrophe - with a dash of solarpunk in its high-rise agriculture - it’s clearly the characters that are foregrounded rather than the science or the politics.
It’s also rare that you’ll find a novel that centres a caring relationship; rarer still to find one in science-fiction. Susanna Kwan is to be commended both for breaking new ground here and for the richness and three-dimensional presentation of Bo, Mia and the entire cast.
The writing is generally excellent (in a mainstream literary style, as you’ll be unsurprised to hear), and in terms of atmosphere and overall effect it’s not a million miles away from Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven.
I even found the climax unexpectedly moving. Who would have thought that the depiction of a multi-media art show would be the closest I’d come to a book-cry all year?
Time however for what is perhaps a controversial opinion: Awake In The Floating City is a quite good book that would make a great movie. In particular, it would make a great arthouse film. Here, it’s lack of breadth and speed would be strengths rather than potential weaknesses; the camera could dwell at its leisure on the central relationship, on the items and artefacts that define Bo, Mia and the Chinese-American experience, and on humanity’s continued survival in a flooded city. It would be beautiful, it would be moving and I definitely would like to see this happen.
But as I’m reviewing a book rather than an imaginary film I will say that – in this format – the novel does suffer a little from a lack of pace and content. For me at least, Awake was a gradual discovery rather than a continually compelling read.
It would also have been interesting to hear more about the survival of San Franciscans and how precarious (or not) their community really is, although I appreciate Kwan is telling a story in miniature and borrowing the aesthetics of solarpunk to do so, rather than publishing a sociological study.
Overall, Awake In The Floating City is a promising first novel and Susanna Kwan is already doing highly interesting things straight out of the gate. An author whose next work could go further into genre or out of it – either way she’s one to watch.
Tim Atkinson
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