The Floating World: A Novel - Hardcover

Babst, C. Morgan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1616205288 ISBN 13: 9781616205287

Publisher: Algonquin Books, 2017

Synopsis

A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICENamed a BEST BOOK OF 2017 by Amazon, Kirkus, Bustle, Southern Living, the Dallas Morning News, and Largehearted Boy"Set in New Orleans, this important and powerful novel follows the Boisdoré family . . . in the months after Katrina. A profound, moving and authentically detailed picture of the storm's emotional impact on those who lived through it." --People
In this dazzling debut about family, home, and grief, C. Morgan Babst takes readers into the heart of Hurricane Katrina and the life of a great city.

As the storm is fast approaching the Louisiana coast, Cora Boisdoré refuses to leave the city. Her parents, Joe Boisdoré, an artist descended from freed slaves who became the city's preeminent furniture makers, and his white "Uptown" wife, Dr. Tess Eshleman, are forced to evacuate without her, setting off a chain of events that leaves their marriage in shambles and Cora catatonic--the victim or perpetrator of some violence mysterious even to herself.

This mystery is at the center of Babst's haunting and profound novel. Cora's sister, Del, returns to New Orleans from the successful life she built in New York City to find her hometown in ruins and her family deeply alienated from one another. As Del attempts to figure out what happened to her sister, she must also reckon with the racial history of the city and the trauma of a disaster that was not, in fact, some random act of God but an avoidable tragedy visited on New Orleans's most vulnerable citizens. Separately and together, each member of the Boisdoré clan must find the strength to remake home in a city forever changed.

The Floating World is the Katrina story that needed to be told--one with a piercing, unforgettable loveliness and a vivid, intimate understanding of this particular place and its tangled past.p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #e4af0a}

About this title

Review

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

From the Author

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Algonquin Books
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1616205288
• ISBN 13: 9781616205287
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384