On a remote Aegean island, the billionaire Thanassis Morel is building the Floating World: a climate-controlled utopia beneath a vast geodesic dome, promising refuge for the ultra-wealthy from the chaos consuming the outside world. When a struggling journalist is hired to propagandize the spectacular exhibition that will inaugurate this new Eden, he jumps at the chance to work with a cult artist – the reclusive Finn Reith – and to restart a life that stopped with the death of his wife two years earlier. Yet beneath the dazzling surface of this collaboration between art and power, he comes to suspect, run deep currents of violence.
As Morel’s monumental folly prepares for its glittering unveiling, he finds it ever more difficult to distinguish the dream from the reality. Who is being excluded from this new paradise? On what buried traumas is it being constructed, and are they poised to return? And how can art protect us against the end of the world? The Floating World is a dystopia, satire and Bildungsroman, steeped in ancient mythology and contemporary politics, a deeply moving, often hilarious and beautifully written debut novel that heralds the arrival of a major new talent in contemporary fiction.
