The Floating World

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.



Ben Eastham is editor-in-chief of e-flux Criticism and a widely published writer on contemporary art. The editor of books on Luis Camnitzer, Arshile Gorky, Fabio Mauri and Stephen Spender, he has worked as curator and editor on international exhibitions including the Shanghai Biennale, Documenta and Seoul Mediacity Biennale, and is on the advisory panel of EVA International. Now based in London, he lived for several years in Athens and Rome, was previously an editor at ArtReview and a founding editor of The White Review, and began his career at the BBC reporting on mass media and propaganda. His previous book, The Imaginary Museum (TLS Books, 2020), is about how works of art reconstruct our experience of the world.