The Floating World
- Author: Ben Eastham (England)
- Book type: English debut novel
- Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
- To be released: October 8, 2026
- Length: 276 pages
- Format: paperback / ebook
- Prize: £ 14.99
- Buying Options >
Ben Eastham The Floating World reviews and information
Whenever a review of the novel The Floating World, written by Ben Eastham, the writer from England, appears in the media, we’ll highlight it on this page.
- “An immersing, crystalline debut novel that reaches out to a world in crisis; elegant, emotional, deeply serious and gloriously witty.” (Deborah Levy, author)
- “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)
- “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)
Blurb of the Ben Eastham novel
On a remote island in the Aegean, a billionaire named Morel is building a refuge for the super-rich from the chaos consuming the outside world. When a struggling journalist is hired to work on the spectacular exhibition that will inaugurate this exclusive new utopia, he jumps at the chance to restart a career that stopped with the death of his wife. Yet he comes to suspect that beneath the dazzling surface of this collaboration between art and power run currents of real violence.
As the inauguration of the Floating World approaches, he finds it more difficult to distinguish dream from reality. Who is excluded from this paradise? On what traumas is it being constructed, and are they poised to return? And can art redeem us from the death of our loved ones and the end of the world?
A dystopia, satire and Bildungsroman, steeped in ancient mythology and contemporary politics, The Floating World is a deeply moving, often hilarious and beautifully written debut novel that heralds an exciting new voice in contemporary fiction.
Ben Eastham is an art critic and editor based in London. The editor-in-chief of e-flux Criticism, and a regular contributor to the Guardian, he was previously a founding editor of The White Review and an editor at ArtReview. He has edited books on Luis Camnitzer, Arshile Gorky, Fabio Mauri and Stephen Spender, worked on exhibitions including the Shanghai Biennale and documenta, and is on the advisory panel of EVA International. He began his career as a journalist at the BBC reporting on global mass media and propaganda, and has lived in Athens and Rome. His previous book, The Imaginary Museum (TLS Books, 2020), is about how works of art change the way we see the world.