The Floating World: A Novel

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.”. 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. A dazzling debut about family, home, and grief, The Floating World takes readers into the heart of Hurricane Katrin

Babst’s writing is fluid and insidious and hauntingly beautiful. "A richly written, soak-in-it kind of book.utterly affecting."—Library Journal, 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. 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 powerful and lyrical novel captures the emotional currents in New Orleans after Katrina. Morgan Babst masterfully, hauntingly, evokes the devastated and devastating landscape of post-Katrina Ne