Events › Meet Susanna Kwan, Author of Awake in the Floating City

On Wednesday, August 26 at 6:30 pm, San Mateo County Libraries welcomes Bay Area author Susanna Kwan to the Millbrae Library to discuss her novel, Awake in the Floating City. 

Kwan's is 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.

Praise for Awake in the Floating City

Winner of the Asian American Award for Literature in Adult Fiction

“[A] tender, speculative novel that imagines [Kwan’s] home city flooded and largely abandoned—and how two of its last remaining residents find unlikely connection in disaster.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“Awake in the Floating City is an astonishing work of art, rich with attention, patience, and love: the rare elegy that hums with hope and makes the strongest case I’ve ever read for remembering the people and places that matter to us. Kwan’s prose pulses with uncommon attention to the natural world, attuned to both its beauty and devastation. 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

“Marvelously graceful…While this gem sits firmly between the mushrooming genre of climate fiction and the more subdued melancholia of Station Eleven or The Dog Stars, it’s very much its own creature, meditating with fresh eyes on the resilience of memory and the inevitability of time.”
—Kirkus, starred review

Meet Susanna Kwan

Susanna Kwan is an artist and writer from San Francisco. Her work has been supported by fellowships from Kundiman, Storyknife, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, and Vanderbilt University. Awake in the Floating City is her first novel. She teaches writing with The Dream Side.