Awake in the Floating City: A Novel by Susanna Kwan (5/13/25)

An utterly transporting debut novel about the unexpected relationship between an artist and the 130-year-old woman she cares for-two of the last people living in a flooded San Francisco of the future, the home neither is ready to leave.Bo knows she should go. Years of rain have drowned the city and almost everyone else has. Her mother was carried away in a storm surge and ever since, Bo has been alone. She is stalled: an artist unable to make art, a daughter unable to give up the hope that her mother may still be alive. Half-heartedly, she allows her cousin to plan for her escape-but as the departure day approaches, she finds a note slipped under her door from Mia, an elderly woman who lives in her building and wants to hire Bo to be her caregiver. Suddenly, Bo has a reason to stay. Mia can be prickly, and yet still she and Bo forge a connection deeper than any Bo has had with a client. Mia shares stories of her life that pull Bo back toward art, toward the practice she thought she'd a