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.
Our conversation with Susanna Kwan will be followed by a Q&A and book signing. The first 25 audience members will receive their own free giveaway copy of Awake in the Floating City!
Finding Life in a Drowning San Francisco
“There is a single question animating and justifying Kwan’s characters’ actions, a question both urgent and perennial: ‘Who knew how much longer all this would exist?’ Years into the future, Kwan posits, when climate catastrophe has devolved and decayed everything around us, we will be all we have. We should care, her writing suggests, because care is all there is in the end.” —KQED
Winner of the California Book Award for First Fiction and the Asian Pacific American Award for Literature in Asian American Adult Fiction, Awake in the Floating City follows Bo, a disillusioned artist grappling with her purpose in a San Francisco transformed by relentless rain.
Bo is mourning her mother, her artistic drive and her home as she once knew it. Still, when her 130-year-old neighbor, Mia, slips a note under her door that reads, “I need help,” Bo answers the call. What follows is a tender, sweeping meditation on care, connection and art’s power to transmit meaning, even at the end of the world.
Meet Susanna Kwan
“This book is about the search for connection at every level—from the most basic task of figuring out how thousands of written fragments fit together, to the relationship between the two central characters, to my hope for eventual readers who will find something meaningful within the pages.” — Susanna's Interview in Lit Hub
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.
Learn more at https://susannakwan.com
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