<i>The Floating World</i> Unearths Trauma Amid Natural Disaster
C. Morgan Babst’s debut novel, which follows a family in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, tests the limits of selflessness and community.
In August 2005, C. Morgan Babst evacuated her native New Orleans less than 24 hours before Hurricane Katrina made landfall. Her debut novel, The Floating World, follows a New Orleans family struggling to find a way forward in the aftermath of Katrina. It’s “a story,” she said in a recent, “about what might have happened if some other version of me had not left.” Leaving, here, refers not only to evacuation, but also to staying away and building a life elsewhere, as Babst herself did in New York. (She has since returned to New Orleans.) For her, the way forward meant constructing a story about the choices the storm forced and those it took away.
