Praise

Named an October Pick by Real Simple, Marie Claire, Ploughshares,
InStyle, Bustle, Bitch, , Paste, and Deep South Magazine

A People Pick, New York Post Required Reading,

Wall Street Journal “Best New Fiction,” one of Bill’s Books,

and Best New Southern Debut by Southern Living

and Samantha Irby approved!

“In scripture, the great flood was a purifying event. When, after 40 days and nights, the rain ceased and the waters receded, wickedness had been cleansed from the earth. (It grew back stronger than ever, but never mind.) But real floods, C. Morgan Babst reminds us in “The Floating World”… don’t wash away human contamination; they bring it to the surface.”
—Sam Sacks, for The Wall Street Journal

“The Floating World is the most striking New Orleans novel inspired by Hurricane Katrina so far, a story as complex and nonlinear as the map of the Crescent City, interweaving the troubles caused by the storm with the specific difficulties one family already faced before the first raindrop fell.”
—Marion Winik, for Newsday

“A richly written, soak-in-it kind of book….utterly affecting.”
—Library Journal, starred review

“The Floating World is a lived-in meditation on the meaning of home, and what happens when home suffers a blow born of both natural disaster and human negligence. It’s a reminder that compassion has limitations, and that the aftermath can be as bad as, or worse than, the storm.”
—Chris Vognar, for The Dallas Morning News

“The Floating World is intelligent and penetrating as it takes on a tragedy that, over a decade past the fact, Americans are still grappling to comprehend.”
—Michelle Anne Schingler for Foreward Reviews, a five star review

“a riveting novel about the inescapable pull of family.”
—Publishers Weekly

“anyone who has experienced loss will be hard hit by Babst’s expert descriptions… details that seem infused with the city’s soul. When Del and her lover dance to Kermit Ruffins in the Quarter, a reader might even feel an urge to sing along: Do you know what it means, to miss New Orleans?”
—Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, for The New York Times Book Review

“The Floating World will swallow you whole… 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…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, for Amazon’s Best Books of October 2017

“Babst’s debut could not be more timely, and in the end, The Floating World serves as a reminder that a hurricane’s havoc can—and should—deliver a jolt to ideas of how helpless we think we are, and shake up delusions about how safely we can barricade ourselves. What happened in New Orleans in 2005, Babst writes early on, was “an act of man.” Her characters know, on some level, that “It was not an act of God. …. It was not a natural disaster.” But coming to terms with that insight, her novel makes clear, doesn’t make the task of rebuilding any easier.”

—Amy Weiss-Meyer, for The Atlantic

An novel of “death and rebirth, [and] the new life that grows from destruction. The scale of the ruin is laid bare through Babst’s beautifully clear writing. . . Tragedies of this size only become real to stunned onlookers across the world through the details that emerge. Babst excels at depicting a familiar landscape utterly altered. . . It is a modern-day wasteland, brilliantly imagined through Creole culture and imagery.”

—Sarah Gilmartin, for The Irish Times

“A beautiful novel that speaks profoundly to the current moment.”
—Amy Brady, for The Chicago Review of Books

“Important…[a] moving and authentically detailed picture of Hurricane Katrina’s emotional impact on those who lived through it.”
—People

“C. Morgan Babst’s portrait of a troubled New Orleans family that fractures further during and after Hurricane Katrina is poetic and suspenseful…An ambitious novel.”
—Gwen Thompkins for NPR

“…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

“A richly written, soak-in-it kind of book….utterly affecting.”
—Library Journal, starred review

“The Floating World is a lived-in meditation on the meaning of home, and what happens when home suffers a blow born of both natural disaster and human negligence. It’s a reminder that compassion has limitations, and that the aftermath can be as bad as, or worse than, the storm.”
—Chris Vognar, for The Dallas Morning News

“a riveting novel about the inescapable pull of family.”
—Publishers Weekly

“A native of New Orleans who evacuated one day before Hurricane Katrina, Babst has an intimate understanding and knowledge of the region’s people and rich culture, its topography and the complex forces of race and class. The result is in a timely debut novel about the power of nature and its omnipresent potential for destruction in every aspect of our lives.”
—Melissa Firman for Shelf Awareness, starred review

The Floating World “is very much of our irritable, harried times. Like Harvey, Katrina was not just a storm but also a reconfiguration of a community. Babst’s novel is an invaluable record of that social devastation—and a warning of the devastations like Harvey to come.”
—Kenneth Champeon for BookPage

“This is a spot-on examination of race and the tumult natural disasters leave in their wake.”
—Samantha Irby for Marie Claire

“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.”
—Amy Jo Burns for Ploughshares

“A story about family, trauma, and race…it reckons with difficult histories that reverberate profoundly in the present.”
—Caroline Rogers for Southern Living

“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.”
—Evette Dionne for bitch

“this wrenching and hypnotic book will give you chills”
——Melissa Ragsdale for Bustle

“Babst offers readers another look into the eye of figurative and literal storms through a novel powerful in its subject matter and rich in emotion.”
—Christianna L. Davies, for the Express-News

“In her recent…novel, “The Floating World,” author and New Orleans native C. Morgan Babst weaves an enthralling narrative of love and loss that is a must-read for casual readers and literary experts alike.”
—Burke Joslin, for the Tulane Hullabaloo

“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. Babst’s sentences are so fresh and alive they leap off the page. This is a beautiful and captivating book.”
—Jessica Shattuck, New York Times bestselling author of The Women in the Castle

“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 Boisdorés 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, author of We Love You Charlie Freeman

“This is a rich and powerful novel, satisfying on many levels – wry, eloquent, passionate, and completely memorable.”
—Valerie Martin, author of Property and The Ghost of Mary Celeste

“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, author of The Rising Water Trilogy

“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, author of The Beautiful Bureaucrat

“This powerful and lyrical novel captures the emotional currents in New Orleans after Katrina. With an authentic and sensitive voice, Morgan Babst explores family, race, class, and the essence of disruption.”
—Walter Isaacson, bestselling author of Steve Jobs