A really beautiful debut reminiscent of Rmily St John Mandel, about so much more than the end of the world. Awake in a Floating City is a novel about art and memory, about grief and found family, about what love looks like when nothing else is left. Slow burning, prosaically beautiful, I thoroughly enjoyed.

This was one of my most anticipated books of 2025 so believe me when I say I’m bereft this didn’t land for me.

Based on the hype and blurb, I was expecting a climate dystopia; but instead, the primary focus of this book is Bo’s relationship with art and her building a large art installation.

The world-building was so skint. The story takes place in a flooded San Francisco. We can assume this happened as a result of climate breakdown but it’s not explored. Somehow the folks living in this flooded city are able to get money, have rental agreements, send and receive mail, require passports, participate in capitalism… It reads like this is an isolated pocket and the rest of the world has just kept on truckin’. I was distracted by the fact that the pull of the tides and water flooding the bottom three storeys of the apartment blocks wasn’t a more urgent problem than a throwaway sentence mention at 85%.

I couldn’t connect with Bo. Nothing she did made sense to me and I didn’t understand her motivations or actions. She wasn’t a strong character, she was uncommunicative, and infuriatingly passive — I moved from not caring about her to actively disliking her by the end.

The writing style didn’t work for me either. The pace was super slow with info dumps about history, tangential characters, and backstory that it didn’t flow as a cohesive narrative for this reader. The storytelling was heavy on exposition (told largely in Bo’s thoughts) and I struggled to be invested in Bo and Mia’s family histories because I couldn’t connect with them as characters.

If you’re looking for rich dystopian world-building, climate thrills, or sci-fi elements, this might not be the read for you. If you like slow-paced, kinda claustrophobic stories with art as its focus, you might have a better time than I did.

⚠️ Content advisories for this story: detailed description of dying and death of an elderly person.