San Francisco is drowning. After seven years of rain, its streets have become rivers, its infrastructure is decaying and most people have abandoned the city. Among those who remain is Bo, a forty-year-old artist who has struggled to create since losing her mother in the floods and now works as a caregiver for the elderly. Bo is about to evacuate by boat to join her relatives up north when a note is slipped under her door. ‘I need help’, it reads. It is signed by her 130-year-old neighbour Mia, who lives alone. In a decision inexplicable to her family, Bo misses the boat and stays to look after Mia. 

In her debut novel, Susanna Kwan, a San Francisco native, describes the drenched city in limpid prose, eschewing the kind of dramatic cataclysm usually found in disaster narratives for quiet entropy. Communities cling together despite collapse. Residents get their food via the rooftop economy of market vendors or live off the mycelium walls in their homes. Librarians serve as local linchpins, connecting those in need with resources – medical services, food pantries, records of the lost city.

As Bo cares for Mia’s failing body, she begins to comprehend Mia’s life as a series of displacements caused by war and privation, entangled with the history of Chinese immigration to America. She decides to transform Mia’s memories into art, even as she grapples with the purpose of art in