Hear author Susanna Kwan discuss Awake in the Floating City, this year’s One City One Book selection. Set in a future San Francisco transformed by climate change and rising seas, the novel explores family, displacement, memory, resilience, and what it means to find belonging in a changing city. Kwan will be in conversation with Becca Prowda.
Awake in the Floating City follows Bo, an artist who has remained behind as much of the city has been abandoned, and Mia, a 130-year-old woman who hires Bo as her caregiver. As their relationship deepens, Mia's memories draw Bo back toward her art and toward the history of a city that is slowly disappearing. Bo's city is imagined, but the questions she's forced to answer aren't. In the novel, Sansome Street and Chinatown resurface as places still worth returning to — landmarks that anchor memory even as the water surrounds them. Kwan's imagined future invites us to consider what makes a place home, and what remains when that place is transformed.
Doors open at 1:30 p.m.
Book sales and signing follow the event, courtesy of Borderlands Books.
Susanna Kwan is an artist and writer from San Francisco. Her debut novel, Awake in the Floating City, won the California Book Award for First Fiction and an Asian Pacific American Award for Literature, and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Climate Fiction Prize. She teaches writing with The Dream Side.
Becca Prowda proudly serves as the First Lady of San Francisco. She is also the Director of Protocol for Governor Gavin Newsom and the State of California. Originally from Seattle, Becca holds a B.A. in Political Science from Barnard College. A passionate supporter of the arts, she serves on the Board of Directors at SFMOMA and is Co-Chair of the museum’s Committee on Trustees. Becca enjoys exploring San Francisco’s vibrant neighborhoods and trying new restaurants. She can often be spotted picking up trash around the city with her husband, Mayor Daniel Lurie, and their two children.
Environment & Nature
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Author Readings & Lectures
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One City One Book
Events and workshops curated around SFPL’s One City One Book selection. One City One Book: San Francisco Reads is a citywide literary event that encourages members of the San Francisco community to read the same book at the same time. For more information, see sfpl.org/onecityonebook.