Awake in the floating city

Shortlisted for the Climate Fiction Prize 2026 - a climate fiction novel with a dystopian world as its setting and at its heart is a human story about compassion in times of great adversity - for fans of Station Eleven and Birnam Wood.

‘Susanna Kwan writes climate change into the grain of ordinary life, allowing us into the intimate world of loss, love and attention’ Kit de Waal, Climate Fiction Prize judge commented on Awake in the Floating City

‘An astonishing work of art...This is the kind of book that changes you, that leaves you seeing more vividly, and living more fully, in its wake’ Rachel Khong, author of Real Americans

‘Gorgeous, lush, struck with humor and light, so warm, caring and care-taking, luminous and wise’ Meng Jin, author of Little Gods

In a future San Francisco transformed by years of rain, Bo, a 40-year-old lapsed artist, is grieving the community she’s lost to catastrophic flooding. Her friends and family have disappeared or fled, the streets are rivers, and the buildings are falling apart.

Yet on the day of her planned departure, Bo finds a note slipped under her door: ‘I need help’, it reads. ‘Three days a week, afternoons. Can pay in cash.’

Unable to bring herself to board the ship that could save her life, Bo instead chooses to answer the note, which turns out to have been written by her neighbour Mia, a 130-year-old “supercentenarian” long abandoned by her own family.