In her stunning debut novel, Susanna Kwan creates a world simultaneously unfamiliar and eerily recognizable—a San Francisco submerged by years of unending rain, where the inundated streets have become rivers and life continues reluctantly on higher ground. More than just another climate catastrophe narrative, Awake in the Floating City is a meditation on memory, loss, and the human instinct to preserve what matters amid inevitable change.
The Drowned World We’re Building
Kwan’s vision is arrestingly familiar to anyone following climate science. Her flooded San Francisco feels less like fantasy and more like prophecy. The city she depicts maintains fragments of the place we know today, though transposed to higher elevations: rooftop markets have replaced street vendors, bridges connect neighboring high-rises, and the ground floors of buildings are abandoned to rising waters.
The setting may be apocalyptic, but Kwan’s approach is intimate and focused. Through Bo’s perspective, we experience a community steadily dwindling as residents flee north or overseas to places less saturated by rain. Those who remain develop makeshift economies, jury-rigged living spaces, and a shared understanding that their home is becoming uninhabitable. What’s most affecting is how the characters normalize their circumstances—this is not an acute disaster but a slow-motion catastrophe playing out over years, giving people time to adapt while clinging to old routines.
Stasis and Movement: Character as Geography
At the novel’s center is Bo, a painter who has stopped painting, a daughter unable to accept her mother’s disappearance during a storm surge two years earlier. Bo exists in a psychological limbo that mirrors the physical state of her surroundings—neither fully functioning nor completely given up, suspended between staying and leaving.
Kwan brilliantly uses Bo’s paralysis to explore the psychology of climate displacement. Bo’s cousin Jenson repeatedly attempts to help her evacuate, but she resists, inventing reasons to stay:
“If I leave,” she’d asked Jenson, “how can I be found?”
Eyes bulging, her cousin had responded: “By whom?”
This exchange cuts to the heart of Bo’s denial and the human tendency to delay the inevitable—a microcosm of broader societal responses to climate change.
Contrasting Bo’s stasis is Mia, the elderly woman who hires Bo as her caregiver. At nearly 130 years old, Mia has lived long enough to witness dramatic changes in the city and carries memories of a San Francisco that now exists only in stories and photographs. Through Mia, Kwan explores how personal history intertwines with place, and the tragedy of what’s lost when both a person and their environment disappear simultaneously.
Time as Water
Kwan’s prose flows with a liquid quality that echoes her subject matter. Time in the novel moves unpredictably—sometimes stagnant, sometimes rushing forward. Bo notes that after years of uninterrupted rain, the traditional markers of seasons have dissolved, leaving residents in an eternal present:
In the early days of rain, every change had stood out. Bo had been new to the building then… From her new apartment, she anxiously watched the city transform into something unrecognizable—unfathomable, at first, when for years they had known only drought and the threat of more drought.
This temporal disorientation operates on multiple levels. Mia, having lived well beyond a normal human lifespan, experiences time differently than Bo. The elderly woman slides between past and present, her memories of pre-war China, mid-century San Francisco, and the contemporary moment existing simultaneously in her consciousness.
Memory as Monument
The heart of the novel is Bo’s project to create a memorial for Mia—an evolving artwork that expands from a simple portrait into an ambitious citywide installation of projected images. This creative act becomes Bo’s way of processing not just Mia’s life but the city’s history and her own grief.
Kwan is particularly insightful about art’s function in times of crisis. Bo’s memorial serves multiple purposes:
- A personal offering to honor Mia’s life
- A public acknowledgment of collective loss
- A means of processing grief
- An attempt to preserve fragments of history before they disappear
The installation itself—fleeting projections on raindrops and buildings—speaks to the impermanence of memory and place. It’s a beautiful metaphor for the transience of all human efforts to preserve what matters.
Stylistic Currents
Kwan’s prose style merits special attention. Her sentences are lyrical without being precious, and she has a gift for sensory detail that brings her waterlogged world vividly to life:
Ceramic water-storage tanks filled and overflowed. Black rubber irrigation snakes secured to the perimeter of rooftop garden plots swelled and split. Farmers tried to adapt, sowing and harvesting according to this swing in the weather. Food supplies became unpredictable. People were robbed of their groceries. Sinkholes opened, like the neighborhood’s collective hunger on display in the street. Mouths to swallow a city up.
Her dialogue feels authentic, particularly in the exchanges between Bo and Mia, which capture the tentative dance of two people from different generations navigating an unexpected intimacy. The novel’s pacing mirrors its subject matter—sometimes flowing quickly, sometimes pooling in contemplative moments where time seems suspended.
Shortcomings and Undertows
Despite its considerable strengths, the novel occasionally loses momentum. The middle section, focused on Bo and Mia’s developing relationship, sometimes meanders, with conversations that feel redundant. Some readers might find Bo’s indecision frustrating rather than sympathetic, as her reasons for staying become increasingly tenuous in the face of worsening conditions.
Additionally, some of the world-building details aren’t fully developed. How is electricity still functioning in the building? What systems maintain any semblance of order in this drowning city? These practical questions sometimes distract from the emotional core of the story.
The book’s ending, while poetically appropriate, might leave readers wanting more resolution. But this ambiguity is likely intentional—a reflection of our uncertain climate future.
A Chronicle of Loss and Preservation
What ultimately elevates Awake in the Floating City is its exploration of how we value and preserve what matters. Through Bo’s evolving relationship with art, with Mia, and with her drowned city, Kwan asks profound questions about memory and responsibility:
- What deserves to be remembered?
- Who bears responsibility for preserving the past?
- What happens when both a person and their environment disappear simultaneously?
- How do we balance honoring what’s lost with adapting to new realities?
These questions resonate beyond the novel’s specific setting, applying to communities worldwide facing displacement from climate change, gentrification, or political upheaval.
Final Assessment: A Luminous Debut
Awake in the Floating City announces Susanna Kwan as a significant new voice in climate fiction. While it shares thematic DNA with works like Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 and Ling Ma’s Severance, Kwan’s novel distinguishes itself through its intimate scale and artistic focus.
Instead of grand political solutions or apocalyptic drama, Kwan offers something more subtle and perhaps more honest: a meditation on how ordinary people navigate extraordinary circumstances while trying to preserve what gives life meaning. Through Bo’s evolving understanding of care—for Mia, for art, for memory, for place—we glimpse a possible response to our collective predicament.
In a literary landscape increasingly populated with climate catastrophe narratives, Kwan’s novel stands out for its emotional depth, lyrical prose, and focus on the human need to create meaning even as the water rises. Awake in the Floating City suggests that while we cannot stop the inevitable changes coming to our world, we might still find ways to witness, commemorate, and care for what matters most.
This haunting debut will resonate long after the final page, like ripples spreading across still water.
