The Floating World: A Novel

An Amazon Best Book of October 2017: The Floating World will swallow you whole. Told from the alternating perspectives of the Boisdorés family, C. Morgan Babst’s novel recounts the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It’s a haunting, beautiful, relentless portrait of the devastation the storm inflicted on a city, and a family – dismantling and fracturing everything in its path. With exacting prose, Babst gets to the heat and heartbeat of New Orleans. Like the water that rises from beneath the city, she presents a story that swells with history, poverty and racism, mental illness and violence. The characters are alive with guilt and yearning and are immediately scarred by the things they did—or didn’t do—when the hurricane slammed into their houses, scattered their family, and submerged their city. At a time when much of our focus is on the devastation of recent hurricanes, Babst’s novel serves as an essential and evocative—not to mention, gorgeously written—portrait of the grief and trauma of those that witnessed and experienced Katrina. —Al Woodworth

“This powerful, important novel . . . is New Orleans to the bone, an authentic, detailed picture of the physical and emotional geography of the city, before, during, and after the tragedy, its social strata, its racial complications, the zillion cultural details that define its character . . . Deeply felt and beautifully written; a major addition to the literature of Katrina.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review
 
“The Floating World is a thought-provoking story of class and race and trauma, told through the dramatic prism of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Babst’s sentences are so fresh and alive they leap off the page. This is a beautiful and captivating book.” —Jessica Shattuck, New York Times bestselling author of The Women in the Castle
 
“This book is an achingly precise diagram of a city and family in heartbreak. Babst’s writing is fluid and insidious and hauntingly beautiful. The Boisdorés join some of the great families of American fiction, fascinating kinfolk through whom we watch the rise and fall and rise of New Orleans.” —Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of We Love You, Charlie Freeman 
 
“In powerfully lyrical prose, Morgan Babst evokes the shattered lives strewn in the wake of the levee collapses that left New Orleans in ruins. It’s a story still difficult to believe—even by those of us who lived through it.” —John Biguenet, author of The Rising Water Trilogy
 
“This is a rich and powerful novel, satisfying on many levels—wry, eloquent, passionate, and completely memorable.” —Valerie Martin, author of Property and The Ghost of Mary Celeste
 
“This powerful and lyrical novel captures the emotional currents in New Orleans after Katrina. With an authentic and sensitive voice, Morgan Babst explores family, race, class, and the essence of disruption.” —Walter Isaacson, bestselling author of Steve Jobs