"Her own searching returned to her now in surges, those hopeless, hopeful days, streets churning with water, the ocean everywhere. She'd never stop, she wouldn't; a memory couldn't be drowned."

Set in approximately 2050 in a flooded San Francisco, Bo, a caregiver for the elderly, and Mia, a supercentenarian who's without family in the area, form an unexpectedly close friendship in their city surrounded by water.

Torn between her desire to stay in the city where she was raised, where she lost her mom in a large flood, and leaving at the urgency of her family, Bo has made a living out of caring for the elderly. In a city now of rooftops rather than streets, of boats and skywalks rather than cars and bridges, there are many elderly in the city, some refusing to go and some with no where to turn. But Bo's desire to stay, outweighs her desire to do as her own family says. For many years, Bo struggled as an artist, but with the changing city around her and the loss of her mother, she's drifted away from art and is focused instead on simply surviving.

Mia, about to celebrate her 130th birthday, is a little grumbly but more than a little lonely. Having Bo suddenly in her life has made her start to cautiously open up. And Bo listens with increasing dedication as Mia shares long stretches of her personal history. What springs up between them is the kind of closeness that could only have come at the end for Mia — whose life has been long but was often difficult.

Kwan has penned a stunningly beautiful and measured debut. She weaves Mia's memories into a tapestry of what Bo knows about the city and its rich history, and has Bo stitch in her own experiences alongside. Bo finds dawning inspiration in Mia's story and begins work on an art project to honor this remarkable woman and the extraordinary life she's lived, bringing her own self back into the light of life in the process.

This novel makes you think of climate fiction but it is much more. The book is about caring for another person and being a caregiver. The rooftop dwelling seemed secondary to the caregiver and artist theme within the book. The author caught the relationship well between caregiver and patient. I found that story very compelling. While becoming a caretaker was about taking care of the patient it was also about self healing.

The world that Kwan created on the rooftops seemed a reasonable adaptation to life in a water filled world. I enjoyed that part without it being a doomsday novel. It helped make the novel something I wanted to continue to read. I thought it was creative.

While we get to know the characters we also learn a lot about the history of San Francisco. I applaud how the author wove that into the book without it feeling like historical fiction. I enjoyed this novel and look forward to more by the author. Thank you Netgalley for the chance to review this novel.

Gorgeously written, but with a slow start. I understand the build up needed for a work like this, but I still struggled to get into it initially. However, by the end, I was totally engrossed.

The imagination required for this was next level - but also not (climate change is real real, you know)? Bo was a mostly likeable character - she had her pitfalls but as I came to know her throughout the chapters, she grew on me. I feel that in talking too much about the plot of this book, I’m going to give too much away, so I will leave it at that.

Overall, a fascinating science fiction tale that is deeply emotionally rooted in relationships and shared history.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing a digital ARC of this title!

3.5, rounded up. This is the second literary novel about a near-future drowning American city I've read this year, after Tea Obreht's magic-realist The Morningside. Susanna Kwan takes an entirely different tack, submerging the mid-20th-century Chinese-American immigrant experience beneath the climate apocalypse of the mid-21st century.

Bo, a blocked visual artist, mourning the recent unresolved loss of her mother, takes a job as a home healthcare aide for Mia, a 130-year-old woman whose narcissistic daughter has abandoned her. No surprises here that the two of them form a temporary family, as Mia shares her recollections of her deep and rich life experiences, which take her from a village in wartime Guangdong to Hong Kong to postwar Chinatown and the Outer Sunset. Meanwhile, Bo rekindles her passion for art-making by using drones and holograms to project a memorial to Mia, using skyscrapers as screens.

Oddly, it's the futuristic narrative of submerged high-rises in a depopulated San Francisco that seems more lived-in and realistically-rendered than the well-researched archival historical reconstructions (perhaps that was Kwan's point all along). The main characters are complex and thorny, and their moving moments of connection felt earned, but the secondary characters (mostly male) were flatly-drawn. Kwan's prose is elegant and poetic, but that didn't fully compensate for narrative problems with pacing and longueurs, and mechanical plot complications.

<i>Thanks to Netgalley and Pantheon for providing an ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.</i>

3.75⭐️
If you’re looking for a dystopian novel about the effects of climate change on the world, this really isn’t it. That’s the most upsetting thing about this book. The synopsis is slightly misleading. Does that mean you shouldn’t read it? Absolutely not. This is the excellent character study of family dynamics and of found family. I really enjoyed how Kwan set up this dystopian world where it has been raining for so long, people have created markets and communities on roofs, where boats are the common form of transportation, and people are struggling to escape to dryer climates. I also found the idea of people being able to live twice as long an interesting plot point to add. I’m not sure it really made sense, it felt sort of out of place, but the author did take a realistic approach to how that would affect family dynamics. And Kwan’s writing is beautiful. When it came to the setting, Kwan excellently portrays the water logged landscape and the way people adapted and adjusted. It was easy to visualize.

I did struggle with the relationship between Bo and Mia. As the book progressed I really struggled feeling that their relationship was anything special or important. I never really felt like it was that great of a relationship. Mia seemed completely dependent on Bo but also seemed mostly bothered by her. Bo seemed more obsessed about her art than about Mia. The relationship Bo had with Eddie was beautiful and I felt the love they had for each other within those chapters, but that was completely lacking with Bo and Mia. I also enjoyed the relationship between Mia and Beverly and Bo and Beverly.

That was another part that was confusing: Bo’s art. I had a really hard time visualizing what Bo was doing, how she was doing it, and what the final product ultimately was. I feel like that was unnecessarily complicated and almost required a knowledge of art I just didn’t have.

I would probably recommend this book, especially for those that enjoy character based books, but I would definitely consider reading more from this author in the future.

***Thank you NetGalley, Susanna Kwan, and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for an advance copy in exchange for an honest review. ***

I really really enjoyed this one. It was slow, but if you take your time and read a little at a time, you can really immerse yourself in it.

It’s clear the author is also an artist, and I loved the way Mia helped Bo find passion in her art again. I do think if you’re going into this expecting a dystopian / sci-fi story, you’ll be disappointed. It is definitely more literary fiction and character driven, but if you like those type of stories this is a good one!

Awake in the Floating City is set in the future in San Francisco, where climate change has made the city almost unlivable and there are very few people left. Interestingly, I also read "All the Water in the World" earlier this year, and thought this sounded very similar, but they are quite different books. Awake is less dystopian, there is still housing, jobs, technology, etc., but there is a general feeling throughout the book that time is running out. The book focuses on Bo and her relationship with Mia, to whom she is a caretaker, and to her art, which has been stalled but then gets reinspired. The book can be a little slow at times, but it is well written and powerful.

this is a touching story about the power of human relationships, and the legacy they build, even at the end of a life or a city or a world. while a little long at times, i found it striking and lovely..

Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for the opportunity to read and review this title.
This is the kind of book that makes you want to call your mother. This book really speaks to the profound and devastating loss of a maternal relationship: Bo who has lost her mother and Mia who is estranged from her daughter. Set in the what feels like the not so distant future we are in a world where the weather is in great upheaval. It has been raining for years, and when it began we lost many people to the waves. This book follows Bo and her inability to let her mother and the places they spent time go. She wants to linger for as long as she can so she can stay close to this mother lost beneath the waves. In this stubbornness she meets Mia. Mia really has no choice but to stay. She and her daughter do not have a real tangible relationship anymore. She reaches out to Bo and thus a relationship is born. After time together these women begin to heal parts of themselves by knowing one another. Bo gets to see the feelings she has for her mother through to her death through the death of Mia. This is a really beautiful story. It hurts in all the right places in your heart. This is stunning. Thank you Susanna Kwan this is lovely.

Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for the opportunity to read and review this title.
Awake in the Floating City takes place in a rain-drenched, dystopian version of San Francisco around the year 2050, where people can live up to 130 years. It’s a hauntingly atmospheric world—especially striking to me because I read it during a month when my own town was hit with over a foot of rain. The flooded setting felt all too real.
At its core, this book is about relationships—particularly the layered complexities between mothers and daughters. There are two storylines at play—Bo dealing with the grief of losing her mother, and Mia navigating a strained relationship with her daughter, Beverly. The connection between Bo and Mia isn’t always clear-cut, but it quietly builds into something meaningful. Through caring for Mia, Bo gets the chance to offer the kind of compassion she couldn't extend to her mother—and in the process, seems to reconnect with a version of herself she thought was gone.
That said, I struggled at times with Bo’s purpose in the story. While Mia’s arc was clearer and more emotionally resonant, Bo often felt like she was floating—much like the city around her. Her art plays a big role in the narrative, but the descriptions of her process were overly abstract for me. It wasn’t until the final reveal of her finished piece that her work—and maybe her role—finally clicked.
The novel doesn’t hinge on dramatic twists, and the ending felt expected, but fitting. Still, I was left with a sense of something missing. The tone is reflective, even meditative—but perhaps a little too much so, leaving the emotional impact more muted than I’d hoped.
Readers drawn to character-driven stories about caregiving, aging, and intergenerational grief may find a lot to appreciate here. I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to read this, and while it didn’t fully land for me, I admire what it set out to do.

A slow, quiet, and at times almost meditative look at a future where climate change has transformed a once iconic city into something strange, new, and, probably doomed. As San Francisco sinks beneath the waves, some residents choose to remain in high-rise buildings even as their neighbors abandon ship for drier shores. This new city floats above the water, and while an interesting premise itself, the book focuses on the exploration and development of the relationship between two residents, the elderly Mia and Bo, a woman who has stayed behind to look for traces of her mother but also becomes Mia's caretaker. Beautiful writing and great character work really stand out here, though readers looking for something heavy on plot or with a quicker pace might get turned away by this one.

I found this book very well-written and very profound. Set in the not-so-distant future (it seems like 2050s or 2060s), this book takes place in San Francisco, where it's been raining and flooding for seven years and the majority of people have left the city. Bo is an artist whose mother died two years ago in a big flood: ever since, Bo has felt stuck and unable to leave, even though the rest of her family has already moved away. Then she gets asked to be a caretaker for Mia, her 130-year-old neighbor, and everything changes.
 
This book reminded me a lot of All the Water in the World, which I read a few months ago and loved. But that was more of an adventure story, while this book is more about how you build a life when the world is falling apart. Bo is completely adrift, lost without her family and her art but also anchored in a way she can't escape. Mia is alone, as well, and she is dying, slowly but surely. Their relationship moves from unease to tenderness to contempt to unease to something like friendship and all the way back, and it's a really moving portrayal of caretaking and finding a purpose when everything is just so messed up. The difficulties of caretaking for both sides weren't sugarcoated, and I loved the complexities of Bo and Mia's different family dynamics and relationship with the past and present.

This book also really explores Bo and Mia's Chinese-American identities and details Mia's life growing up in rural China and living under Japanese occupation, and then moving to San Francisco with a husband she barely knew and trying to make it work. I really enjoyed that aspect of the book - it was interesting to see what Bo learned that she never knew, and it provided lots of space for Bo and Mia to understand each other. I also just feel like I learned a lot, especially as the book was ending.

Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for an advanced reader's copy in exchange for an honest review!

This is a tough book to rate because expectations will deeply impact perception.

Awake in the Floating City is not a sci fi / dystopian novel, though its setting is dystopian. I was really drawn to the premise as a life long san franciscan given it is set in a future’s flooded San Francisco deeply impacted by climate change. But very quickly the story shifts from a future under climate catastrophe to an intergenerational friendship exploring memory, time and adaptability as the world becomes more an more uninhabitable.

Which is all to say: as a work of speculative fiction, it felt somewhat unsatisfying. But as literary fiction, it's a beautifully written story of friendship and survival. Adjust expectations accordingly.

Thank you to Net Galley and Pantheon for the ARC in exchange for my honest review. We are taken to a San Francisco of the future where flooding has made the city nearly unlivable. Yet, few remain - mainly those who could make the trip, the elderly and disabled. Bo knows she should have left but can't seem to go as her mother disappeared during a deluge and has always had hope she would find her. Her cousin has arranged for Boto leave the city and, just before she's scheduled to leave, she receives a note from an elderly neighbor, Mia, asking if she would become her caregiver. She now has her reason to stay a while longer. Even though Mia can be grumpy and difficult, a beautiful relationship develops, one that as a surrogate mother and the other as a surrogate daughter as Mia's daughter lives in Europe and wasn't able to come to get her mother (or didn't want to?). The beginning of the book sets up this post-apocalyptic world they live in and the rest is their relationship. At times, the story lagged but the ending is quite beautiful with a lovely and surprisingly last couple chapters. 3.5 stars.

I don't have a personal connection to San Francisco, but after reading this novel, I felt every inch of the emotion of place the author wanted to invoke.

I love slow, dystopian works that focus on the people rather than the circumstances. I find it fascinating to see how others view the possibilities of life after collapse. This is definitely a slow moving story but it is an interesting reflection on the history of San Francisco and how memory and place tie unlikely people together when needed.

I learned a lot about the history of San Francisco, as well as ideas of art and the possibilities that technology has in bringing together in times of crisis.

I did feel that it had a period in the middle of the story that dragged on a bit too much for my preference, but the beauty of the story and of the writing style pulled me back in easily.

Awake in the Floating City is a quiet novel, of a quiet apocalypse, if you will. As in, it isn't a cataclysmic event, rather a slow flooding that is taking down one city at a time, whittling away coasts one by one. San Francisco happens to be among them, and it happens to be where main character Bo lives. Chooses to live, in fact, because she is lucky enough to have extended family who offer her safer accommodations and a way to get to them. But because Bo's mother is missing, presumed drowned in the floods, Bo just cannot seem to take her relatives up on their generous offer.

So she takes on a new job, as she's known around town as a good caregiver to the super-elderly (that is a thing in this time): caring for 130-year old Mia as she is increasingly losing the ability to live on her own. And this, truly, is where the meat of the story lies: in lives lived, and how we leave our mark on the world around us. As Bo attempts to create an artistic rendering of Mia's life as a final birthday gift, she's left to think about the passage of time, the transience of it all. It's very beautiful, thought provoking, and somehow both celebratory and melancholy.

The art part was kind of lost on me- I am not a good visualizer, nor am I very versed in art- but I bet it would be phenomenally powerful onscreen. Or, for those better able to visualize, though the finished product definitely made me tear up! The overall story is light on plot but heavy with character development and relationships.

A melancholic and moving meditation on legacy and memory, shaped by an artist living in a flooded future, that’s just a little too oblique for me.

It has been raining nonstop for 7 years in San Francisco and most residents have left the city for drier pastures. Bo has had several opportunities to leave, but always ends up drifting into staying. She lives alone eking out a skeletal existence on a high floor of a mostly deserted block, taking jobs as a caregiver for elderly people who either have no family or who have been left by them.

When she is contacted by Mia, a 130-year old neighbor, who wants company as much as she needs assistance, Bo finds a purpose: she wants to create a memorial for Mia and for all those like her who emigrated to San Francisco from China in the early 20th century. Mixing Mia’s stories with research from a rundown library and Bo’s own paintings, she sets out to create an elegy for a nearly-forgotten population and way of life.

The world building is gorgeous with a deeply felt sense of place, doubtless helped by San Francisco being the author’s, and my, home. The richly imagined destroyed and decaying city is counterpointed with the remaining residents’ tenacious quotidian existence.

But, as I should have known when I saw that this was described as “lyrical” - my Kryptonite in books - I found this slow to the point of eye-rolling and occasionally too needlessly cryptic. So while I could appreciate much of this, I felt a little more plot would have given me a better toehold.

Thanks to Pantheon and Netgalley for the digital review copy.

What a beautiful, haunting book about the end of life (for an individual and the world), an unexpected friendship, and lessons on preserving life in the face of extreme loss. What determines whose life is ordinary or whose life should be memorialized? What. Is the role of art in facilitating these questions?

While a slow draw, this book was beautiful and really brought up some important questions for me to think about. I loved the friendship between the two female MCs. With so few characters, the book achieves a lot and I’ll be thinking of this one for a long time.

I loved this quiet, literary post-apocalyptic novel. It's not heavy on plot, but it doesn't need to be. It's a beautiful exploration of how one woman (a visual artist) is trying to keep living her life in a flooded and nearly unrecognizable San Francisco, while working as a caregiver to an elderly woman. If you're a fan of realistic dystopian novels that are more character-focused than plot-based, absolutely pick this one up.

I wanted to love this book but unfortunately I don’t think I was the target audience for it. I appreciated thr free electronic arc provided by the publisher