The Floating World: A Novel - Hardcover

C. Morgan Babst studied writing at NOCCA, Yale, and NYU. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in such journals as the Oxford American, Guernica, the Harvard Review, LitHub, and the New Orleans Review, and her piece “Death Is a Way to Be” was honored as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2016. She evacuated New Orleans one day before Hurricane Katrina made landfall. After eleven years in New York, she now lives in New Orleans with her husband and child.

“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