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?

'Novels like this don't come around very often. Ben Eastham's The Floating World is transporting in every sense of the word. A meditation on the brutal and beautiful nexus where art and money meet, an odyssey of grief and discovery, a rallying cry against the people ruining the world from those that are trying to change it. It's a towering achievement.' ― Dominic Amarena, author of I Want Everything

'An immersing, crystalline debut novel that reaches out to a world in crisis; elegant, emotional, deeply serious and gloriously witty.' Deborah Levy, author of August Blue

'Startlingly imaginative, The Floating World is at times like the work of a J. G. Ballard for the 2020s, at others like the reincarnation of Italo Calvino. Eastham is as deft with a finely observed comic riff as he is with a heart-stoppingly lovely description of a city, a gesture, a connection. In his hands, what could have been a satire of art-world hubris becomes something so attuned to the world - its wonder and its clear and present danger... I don't want to sound mawkish, but ultimately it's a novel about our boundless potential to connect, and what we should ultimately value.' Luke Kennard, author of Black Bag

'The world - that is, the protagonist - floats through opaque settings of fateful money, violent strangers and ghostly love; a tender, guilty work of wish-fulfillment and the most valuable kind of first novel, documenting the author's struggle to reconcile right action with the egomaniac work of writing books.' Nell Zink, author of Sister Europe

'An astute satire about the absurdities of the artworld, a compelling mystery and an elegy, The Floating World is unputdownable: frequently funny, often moving and always intriguing.' Jennifer Higgie, author of The Other Side

'By turns witty and lyrical, The Floating World is a compelling aftermath novel, in which the world is eventually forced into a shape that's monstrous enough to express a man's grief.' Barney Norris, author of Undercurrent

'Channelling Adolfo Bioy Casares, Eastham carries a vision of art's complicity with power to its endgame. If Art Basel is now globalized, then so is Minneapolis. Looping civilization back to end where it began, in Athens, he proposes that the only counterforce to fascism is love.' ― Tom McCarthy, author of The Making of Incarnation





About the Author :
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.




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