The Floating World

On a remote island in the Aegean, a billionaire named Morel is building a refuge for the super-rich from the chaos consuming the outside world. When a struggling journalist is hired to work on the spectacular exhibition that will inaugurate this exclusive new utopia, he jumps at the chance to restart a career that stopped with the death of his wife. Yet he comes to suspect that beneath the dazzling surface of this collaboration between art and power run currents of real violence. As the inauguration of the Floating World approaches, he finds it more difficult to distinguish dream from reality. Who is excluded from this paradise? On what traumas is it being constructed, and are they poised to return? And can art redeem us from the death of our loved ones and the end of the world? A dystopia, satire and Bildungsroman, steeped in ancient mythology and contemporary politics, The Floating World is a deeply moving, often hilarious and beautifully written debut novel that heralds an exciting new voice in contemporary fiction.

Ben Eastham is editor-in-chief of e-flux Criticism and a widely published writer on contemporary art. The editor of books on Luis Camnitzer, Arshile Gorky, Fabio Mauri and Stephen Spender, he has worked as curator and editor on international exhibitions including the Shanghai Biennale, Documenta and Seoul Mediacity Biennale, and is on the advisory panel of EVA International. Now based in London, he lived for several years in Athens and Rome, was previously an editor at ArtReview and a founding editor of The White Review, and began his career at the BBC reporting on mass media and propaganda. His previous book, The Imaginary Museum (TLS Books, 2020), is about how works of art reconstruct our experience of the world.