Longlisted for The Center for Fiction 2025 First Novel Prize

A Best Book of the Spring from ELLE

A Best New Release of May from Alta

A Most Anticipated Book of the Year from People, San Francisco Chronicle, Electric Literature, Axios San Francisco, 7x7, and HeatMap

“The role of community during environmental disaster is one of the themes that runs through this thoughtful novel about art, creation and the ways we care for one another…Survivalists preparing for an imagined catastrophic future hoard food and supplies and stock up on guns to ‘protect’ themselves from those in need. But as Kwan shows, such visions of the future are the refractions of nihilism and the American belief that individual survival and success is due solely to individual effort. But that’s never been the case. What preserves human life—even a life in horrific circumstances—are relationships of caring and cooperation. Community built on taking care of each other is the only way that we will thrive.”—Los Angeles Times

“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. Awake in the Floating City 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.”—Washington Post

“Another strong addition to the library of fiction haunted by climate change. Susanna Kwan’s debut novel ponders more than ecological uncertainty, though; it meditates on time and grief, the importance of making art, and the utter centrality of human relationships.”—Boston Globe