Floating World

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.”

“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.” Deep South Magazine

“As hurricane victims begin the arduous process of recovering and rebuilding their communities, The Floating World offers a fictional, but very real example of the struggles they’ll face. What becomes of those harmed by natural disasters after the news cameras leave and attention is diverted to the next human crisis? That’s the question at the center of The Floating World, a book that will surely give its readers empathy for all those who are putting their lives back together.” BitchMedia

“A soulful inquiry of race, class, and family in the dawn of trauma, The Floating World doesn’t just look into the eye of such a devastating storm. The storm itself becomes the lens through which the Boisdorés begin to see the world more clearly. Through it, we see what loyalty truly looks like — the impossible choice to stay or leave, the terrorizing heartbreak of return — and the cost of what we hold onto, what we must release in order to survive.” Ploughshares

“[A] powerful, important novel...This 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: the parrots in the palm trees, the pork in the green beans, the vein in the shrimp, ‘the goddamned tacky way he flew his Rex flag out of season.’ Deeply felt and beautifully written; a major addition to the literature of Katrina.” Kirkus Reviews, starred review

The Floating World tells the story of the Boisdores, a Creole family whose roots stretch back nearly to the foundation of New Orleans, as they attempt to reassemble their lives following Hurricane Katrina. Though the storm is fast approaching the Louisiana coast, Cora Boisdore, the family s fragile elder daughter, refuses to leave the city. Her parents, Joe Boisdore, an artist descended from freed slaves who became the city s preeminent furniture makers, and his white Uptown wife, Dr. Tess Eshleman, 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 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, devastated by the storm and its aftermath, and her family deeply alienated from one another. As Del attempts to reach Cora and understand where her sister wanders at night, and what she saw during the hurricane, she must also reckon with the history of the city and the trauma of destruction that was not, in fact, some random act of God but an avoidable tragedy perpetrated on 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.

Told from the points of view of each family member, this gorgeous debut is bathed in the sights, sounds, and smells of New Orleans, and is a profound Faulknerian family saga about what we choose to salvage in a world that destroys everything we hold most dear, and what we can possibly build out of what remains."

C. Morgan Babst studied writing at NOCCA, Yale, and N.Y.U. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in such journals as The Oxford American, Guernica, The Harvard Review, LitHub, The New Orleans Review, and her piece, "Death Is a Way to Be," was honored as a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2016. She evacuated New Orleans one day before Hurricane Katrina made landfall. After 11 years in New York, she now lives in New Orleans with her husband and child. The Floating World is her first book.

For several months — maybe years — following the near-destruction of New Orleans by the levee failures that followed Hurricane Katrina, I wandered around telling everybody that everything was fine. I was fine, my family was fine, the city was going to be fine. Now, obviously, I was lying, but I didn’t know it at the time...

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