About this Event
Hear author Susanna Kwan discuss , 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.
Event venue & nearby stays
Main Library - San Francisco Public Library, 100 Larkin Street, San Francisco, United States
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.