A dazzling debut about family, home, and grief, The Floating World takes readers into the heart of Hurricane Katrina with the story of the Boisdorés, whose roots stretch back nearly to the foundation of New Orleans. Though the storm is fast approaching the Louisiana coast, Cora, the family’s fragile elder daughter, refuses to leave the city, forcing her parents, Joe Boisdoré, an artist descended from a freed slave who became one of the city’s preeminent furniture makers, and his white “Uptown” wife, Dr. Tess Eshleman, 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 C. Morgan Babst’s haunting, lyrical novel. Cora’s sister, Del, returns to New Orleans from the life she has tried to build 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 destruction that was not, in fact, some random act of God, but an avoidable tragedy visited upon New Orleans’s most helpless and forgotten citizens.
The Floating World is the Katrina story that needed to be told--one with a piercing, unforgettable loveliness and a nuanced understanding of this particular place and its tangled past, written by a New Orleans native who herself says that after Katrina, “if you were blind, suddenly you saw.”
Genre: Historical
This mystery is at the center of C. Morgan Babst’s haunting, lyrical novel. Cora’s sister, Del, returns to New Orleans from the life she has tried to build 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 destruction that was not, in fact, some random act of God, but an avoidable tragedy visited upon New Orleans’s most helpless and forgotten citizens.
The Floating World is the Katrina story that needed to be told--one with a piercing, unforgettable loveliness and a nuanced understanding of this particular place and its tangled past, written by a New Orleans native who herself says that after Katrina, “if you were blind, suddenly you saw.”
Genre: Historical
Praise for this book
"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
"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 Boisdores 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
"This is a rich and powerful novel, satisfying on many levels--wry, eloquent, passionate, and completely memorable." - Valerie Martin
"In The Floating World, C. Morgan Babst masterfully, hauntingly, evokes the devastated and devastating landscape of post-Katrina New Orleans with images that are at once surreal and painfully real." - Helen Phillips
"A beautiful and captivating book." - Jessica Shattuck
"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 Boisdores 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
"This is a rich and powerful novel, satisfying on many levels--wry, eloquent, passionate, and completely memorable." - Valerie Martin
"In The Floating World, C. Morgan Babst masterfully, hauntingly, evokes the devastated and devastating landscape of post-Katrina New Orleans with images that are at once surreal and painfully real." - Helen Phillips
"A beautiful and captivating book." - Jessica Shattuck
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