The Floating World

by Ben Eastham

On a remote Aegean island, the billionaire Thanassis Morel is building the Floating 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.

Genres: Fiction, Art, Dystopia, Literary Fiction, Mystery, Ebooks, 21st Century

580 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 29, 2026

Reviews

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer]

But for him to sell this dream, he continued, buyers had to be reassured that they would not be cut off from the rest of the world. This had led Morel to the idea of commissioning a work of art. In the broadest terms, this served to signify the Floating World’s membership of that globalized, mobile, free-market economy of which contemporary art was the cultural expression, like a Balkan city on the fringes of the Roman Empire building a temple to Augustus. More specifically, it would brand the island as a site of innovation and imagination, in which the future was being remade, just as his grandfather had told him. It was my job, Morel said, “to communicate this message.” I realized then that Morel really believed that art could change the world. Indeed, he was more sincere in this faith than most members of what is called the art world, for so many of whom it is a tradeable commodity, aid to intellectual masturbation or networking opportunity. He was not alone in his commitment to art among history’s megalomaniacs, of course. But I admired him for it nonetheless.

 
 
The debut novel of an art critic and writer who was also the co-founding editor of the much heralded arts and literature magazine The White Review (the other co-founding editor Jacques Testard is also of course founder of Fitzcarraldo who are the UK publishers of this novel, although I read the US version).
 
Chronologically it is set in a near future world increasingly succumbing to a series of crises: economic (in fact in the framing device of the novel – a series of chapters set in Dublin where the unnamed first person narrator sets out to write the account we are reading – some form of banking system collapse has occurred); civil disorder (as activists increasingly take to the streets to protest); climate and refugee/migrant crisis (from all of the above plus wars).
 
Geographically, starting in London and Athens (and at the end returning to each) its central parts take place on a fictional Greek island Pantarei – once the site of a kind of utopian model village for the workers who had moved to island in the 1960s to mine rare earths, but one built under a huge geodesic dome which was later abandoned a decade later.  Now 50+ years later, a billionaire known only as Morel, has purchased the dome and conceives of the Island as a new utopian community, but one reserved for the super-wealthy as a kind of collective doomsteading.
 
Our narrator is a South London based ex-art critic turned failed teacher, widowed (his filmmaker but depression racked wife Cora having committed suicide when making a film in the warzone from which her parents migrated – only to killed in a rocket attack years later when returning as aid workers) and now something of a failed teacher – all of which means – despite the political scruples of his friends and in particular the immigration lawyer and culture industry whistleblower meme account founder Rotimi – that he jumps at the chance to join the Floating World as an artistic researcher/consultant (a chance which came via Asha, an old friend of Cora’s).  
 
Asha (and her assistant Selima) and now the narrator work with Reith – a legendary installation artist who has surprisingly come out of retirement to work on the project – on what he conceives of as a series of films which will together form an immersive experience for visitors.   The narrator’s role is to mine (pun intended by me) the history of the Island, its archives and his own imagination to produce a high number of very short outline ideas which can be used by Reith as the starting point for short films (filmed with the workforce of the island due to the complexities of quarantine if they used professional actors).
 
As time progresses he realises that his role also extends to meeting with investors and potential uber-rich customers to basically agree that whatever version of art they feel suited for the dome is exactly what Reith is planning - he also plays a similar and go-between role with Morel.
 
He also becomes increasingly attracted to Selima while realising over time that few on the island can be taken at face value – the exact intentions and aims of Morel and Reith unclear, a level of disquiet among the workers, Selima secretly and actively involved in assisting economic migrants, Asha and Selima seemingly aiming to subvert Morel’s vision.  Even his own intentions are blurred – his own morals and relationship with Selima – taking rather second place to his realisation that his influence with Morel may give him the opportunity of a permanent role.  And meanwhile in both Greece and London disorder both from far right and left wing activists, and authoritarian backlash increases.
 
There is a lot to like in the novel. 
 
The author’s immersion in the modern art world adds its satire of the art world authenticity; and the light humour of the satire of the impact of late capitalism on art reminded me a little of the recent Booker longlisted “Black Bag” although this is a much more erudite (if at times borderline pretentious) novel compared to the rather madcap treatment of Kennard. 
 
Where perhaps it works less well is in the trajectory of the novel – from the first pages and at intervals after that (given the novel is entirely written retrospectively) we are given a clear steer of something disastrous which occurs on the island, but both the final art installation and the event felt like a little of a damp squib compared to the build up.
 
And while the author writes well on art (both modern but also classical – for example Durer’s engraving of the conversion story of St Eustache which is in the front papers and Brugel’s Fall of Icarus which is the cover – both for the US version), the wider ranging topics covered by the novel does seem at times to be lifted from Wikipedia and not always accurately (I was surprised to read that Islam and Judaism and (pre reform) Christianity spread by getting “vernacular translations of the holy book into [people’s] hands”.
 
But nevertheless I think many readers will enjoy their trip to the Floating World.
 
My thanks to Astra House for an ARC via NetGalley
 

[Matt Bender]

It seems like this should be a moment for dystopian novels. Eastman does two things in the floating world that make the novel particularly haunting: the novel takes place right before an imminent catastrophe and his narrator is so incapable of cynicism that it makes the reader imagine the novel’s doom sequence.

While the narrator is so naive that the floating world doesn’t feel like an overtly political novel, it engages with three big themes which are grief (the narrator’s wife was killed in some sort of climate related regional war), the social role of art (the narrator is involved in an art project for a techno-billionaire’s end of the world bunker community), and the lines society draws to segment human beings (there is a constant backdrop of protests and mass migration).

Eastman is an art writer of some sort and the book’s portrayal and critique of how wealth and power use art as an instrument are what you’d expect and feel fully developed. The novel’s weakness is its exploration of grief.

Recent climate disaster novels tend to be tragic (like Tea Obreht’s The Morningside), satirical (Kleeman’s Something New Under the Sun), or a sci-fi-ish thriller (Vara’s The Immortal King Rao). Eastman seems to really want this novel to be tragic, but doesn’t spend enough time developing any of his characters. I can fill in the blanks of a story about ecological loss, geopolitical violence, and the sick ways billionaires behave because I’ve peeked at the news. I can maybe imagine the impact of collective grief from the end to the world, but I found the conclusion of this novel melodramatic because I didn’t ever start to care about any of the characters in it.

[Andrew]

I was drawn to this novel because the title reminded me of An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro, which I reviewed almost 18 years ago. As it turns out, the two novels couldn't be more different, but they do share the same central theme of the role of art in a troubled world.

The differences, I think, are illustrative of our societal direction of travel. In both novels, artists live through times when the world seems to be falling apart. For Ishiguro, it's the rise of militarism in 1930s Japan that would lead to the disaster of World War II, and for Eastham, it's the disintegration of Europe in a near-future dystopia riddled by pandemics and out-of-control climate change.

The "floating world" of Ishiguro's novel is the nightlife of Tokyo, a transient and ephemeral world that the artist tries to fix on the canvas. Ben Eastham's Floating World is very different: a vast dome being constructed on a Greek island by an evil billionaire as a refuge for him and a super-rich minority against the ravages of climate change. This Floating World is intended to be permanent, while the civilisation around it comes to look increasingly fleeting. It's a kind of Noah's Ark designed to preserve a libertarian-tech-bro version of human society from the floods to come.

Ishiguro's narrator, Masuji Ono, made a conscious choice to side with fascism and devote his artistic skills to patriotic propaganda. Looking back on those times, Ono has this to say about his culpability (or lack thereof):

“There’s no need to blame ourselves unduly. We at least acted on what we believed and did our utmost. It’s just that in the end, we turned out to be ordinary men. Ordinary men with no special gifts of insight. It was simply our misfortune to have been ordinary men during such times.”

Eastham's narrator is also an ordinary man with no special gifts of insight. He accepts a job on the Floating World, helping with the research and preparations for a major exhibition being staged by a famous artist to give the doomsday bunker some good PR. He needs the money, and he's been depressed and stuck in his life since the death of his wife several years earlier.

After that, the plot happens to him despite his valiant attempts to remain oblivious to it. The plot is quite intricate, involving a secret smuggling ring to help refugees cross the Mediterranean, a conspiracy against the Floating World itself, and even some surprising connections to his dead wife, but he plays no role in any of it except to stumble around, get the wrong end of the stick and occasionally balls things up.

I found his passivity and lack of agency quite frustrating, but it's probably a fair reflection of the times. Back in 1930s Japan, Ishiguro's antihero enthusiastically waved the flag and deliberately used art to support a cause he genuinely believed in, no matter how disastrous it turned out to be. Today, many of us are sleepwalking into fascism and climate catastrophe while doing little to drive the plot. Many activists are fighting and risking everything, but too many of the rest of us are letting climate change happen to us, letting art and creativity be co-opted. I include myself in this: here I am reviewing literary novels, when a far more appropriate response to the times we are living in would be to glue myself to an airport runway.

The Floating World's author, Ben Eastham, is an art critic for The Guardian and other publications, and he is very good at satirising the art world's unique combination of hypocrisy, pretentiousness and cynicism. For example:

"Next to me was a painter whose market value had for years been inflated by the assumption that he would imminently overdose, creating a demand that would be advantageous to his collectors."

"I followed him up a winding marble staircase to a third-floor corridor lined with people wearing black jeans and black boots or vintage sportswear. By virtue of their determination to look different, artists look much the same everywhere."

"Knowing better than to be cornered by a performance artist, I hurried out of the room. In the kitchen a topless man was striking a brass gong with the heel of his hand. His movement through the room created a press that pushed me into a young woman with small ears and a young man with a tattoo of a fish on his wrist who was saying that the work described a profundity which must be outside of words. She responded by telling him to shut the fuck up, Michael."

"The gallerist went over to engage the women in conversation about the colonisation of time by late capitalism and the competitively priced drawings that illustrated this phenomenon, which could be purchased individually or as a series."

There are also some interesting uses of artistic terms in descriptions. I still can't quite visualise the first one, but overall I found them a nice touch:

"The police on the street below me appeared foreshortened against their shields, like inverted putti."

"a mahogany motorboat like a Venetian water taxi bobbed on the grisaille sea."

"a cosmatesque pattern in sound."

"I was looking out over the town like some self-consciously melancholy Rückenfigur."

Beyond the art world, though, The Floating World is also a book about connection. Events are connected, even when we don't see the connections ourselves. The billionaire's island refuge is an attempt to sever those connections and create a world in which he and his friends are safe as the rest of us burn. Meanwhile, our narrator searches for connections everywhere from Renaissance art to the patterns in a motorboat's wake, while spectacularly failing to see the ones in front of his eyes.

"If I could only read what was written into the world, I thought, then I might better understand how to move through it."

His friends in London don't seem to have the same difficulties—they join strikes and protests against the system that is bringing about their downfall. But he is looking for something different, something deeper. Would it make a difference if he found it? Probably not. Despite his moral qualms about the Floating World, he stays in it, doesn't fight against it in any meaningful way, and at one point pitches the billionaire with an idea of how he could stay in it full-time after his contract ends. As Roland Barthes says in the book's epigraph, "I look for signs, but of what?"

Thanks to Fitzcarraldo Editions for the review copy of The Floating World by Ben Eastham, which will be published in the UK on 8 October. Unusually, although Eastham is a British writer, it looks as if the US edition was launched slightly earlier, by Astra Publishing House.

[melissareadshorror]

Thanks to Astra Publishing House and NetGalley for an eARC of The Floating World in exchange for an honest review.

Rating: 3 / 5

The concept of this book drew me in but I was not a fan of the writing style. I hope it finds its audience

[Paul Fulcher]

Everyone says that the signs were plain to see. But London, when I landed, was much the same as I remembered it. Spurs were giving up a two-goal lead, to the frustration of my taxi driver, and the pubs were spilling onto Liverpool Street. If the city was that summer a tinderbox, as has become the received wisdom , then I saw little indication in those days of a nationwide coming to political consciousness. But it was very hot, by the standards of the city.

Ben Eastham's The Floating World is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in the UK and Astra House in the US.

Eastham is known for his writing on art, botk books and in the media, most recently for the Guardian, and for co-founding with Jacques Testard, who also founded and runs Fitzcarraldo, the arts and literature magazine THE WHITE REVIEW.

The (unnamed) first-person narrator of the novel opens his account from a house in the Irish countryside owned by (we later find, an artist) Reith. Some form of economic crash has occurred, the banking system has at least temporarily collapsed, but as an employee at the local garden centre remarks, she is still working, keeping the plants alive until (or if) normality resumes. The narrator then begins to write his account of events on The Floating World, which forms the bulk of the novel, one which we know ends badly:

If you are impatient to learn who was to blame for the disaster, then you might as well be disappointed now. The truth is that I don’t know. The only thing I can say with any certainty is that it had nothing to do with me.

Our narrator is or was an art critic living in South London. He was widowed at a young age when his wife, Cora, dies of suicide, after, while suffering from depression, visiting an overseas town, one close to a warzone, where her parents had died in an attack, planning to make a film. He decides to become a teacher but is an unsuccessful one, and as his account opens he's been approached by Asha, a friend of Cora's, to participate in an artistic project on The Floating World, rather to the horror of his left-wing best friend, Rotimi.

“The Morel Corporation is really evil,” said Rotimi, “... Just look at the Floating World. It’s literally a doomsday bunker for billionaires. It’s a gated community beneath a giant dome on a desert island. They might as well have built it into the heart of a volcano, they might as well have installed a swimming pool full of sharks, they might as well have put a sign up. You know the Morel Corporation trades with apartheid states, that it manufactures arms, that it has made billions of dollars by defying the embargoes?”

“But it’s not the Morel Corporation I’d be working for,” I objected, “it’s the Morel Foundation. The Morel Corporation is rebuilding the Floating World. The show I’ll be working on is funded by the Morel Foundation, the charitable organization. Legally separate from the corporation.”

The billionaire Morel has conceived the idea of building a utopia-for-the-rich on a Greek island, Pantarei. Rare earth mineral deposits were discovered on the uninhabited island in the late 1950s. A large dome, Harmonia, was built there in the boom years of the 1960s as a colony for mine workers, but had been abandoned in the economic downturn of the 1970s and had remained as a ruin. Morel and his Corporation have purchased the island and are now refurbishing it, as he is told by Sofia, daughter of the original architect.

The reconstruction of Harmonia as the Floating World was a travesty, was the sum of it. The dome had been built to house mine workers and their families, had been modeled on the garden cities of Bournville in England and Garbatella in Italy. It was intended to dignify the lives of ordinary workers rather than to serve as a gated community for the rich, in Sofia’s telling. She couldn’t countenance its renovation as a bolthole for the world’s richest people, because it was a betrayal of her father’s intentions. Her commitment to these principles struck me as charmingly old world.

Morel has commissioned a formerly-retired installation artist Reith, whose works the narrator was introduced to by Cora, to curate a large-scale art installation as part of the opening of the Floating World, and Reith is working with Asha, and her assistant Selima. His job is largely to persuade Morel's investors and potential customers as to the merit of the artistic project, as well as to help Reith with stories from the island to inspire his work.

“Look, Morel is branding the Floating World as a sustainable, holistic, homeostatic community for powerful people who want insurance against the end of the world. So Reith’s project needs to be framed in those terms. Morel must be reassured that the work is spectacular, celebratory, optimistic.”

“Okay,” I said. “But Reith is planning some kind of esoteric death ritual, from what I can gather.”

“Doesn’t matter. Our job is to give Reith the space to make what Reith wants, by convincing Morel that he’s making what Morel wants . That’s what you are here for. To make the work mean whatever Morel wants it to mean, to keep the stakeholders happy and the funders on board. If those people like the sound of what’s coming, then Morel is happy. Which means he’s not on Reith’s case and I’m not on yours.”

“Right. But are you not worried that these people will, you know, check?”

“None of these people give a shit about the actual work,” said Asha, sharply, “as long as the story suits them. They know nothing about art beyond what their advisors tell them, and the advisors know nothing about art beyond its function as a marketing opportunity or tradeable commodity. They will believe what they are told about it, on the condition that everyone else believes it too.”

And our narrator finds himself pulled in conflicting directions - he wants to impress Reith and is (overly) flattered when his suggestions and findings are incorporated in the project; he falls for Selima, but discovers that her and Asha's planned subversion of the project is far more political and activist (linked to the refugee movement) than simply artistic; and yet he also speaks frequently with Morel, and starts to be sold on the merit of his plans, and looks to find a way that he can be invited as a permanent artistic resident:

Rotimi was sending me news from London of runs on the banks, soldiers breaking up campus demonstrations, roaming far-right mobs, the overcrowding of broken hospitals, the encampment or expulsion of tens of thousands of people. And here I was, convinced that the waters of a great flood were rising, having weekly conversations with Noah about the progress of his ark. Who wouldn’t be wondering whether there was space left onboard?

One intriguing motif in the novel is an oil painting based on Albrecht Dürer's engraving of the conversion story of Saint Eustace, one reproduced in the front papers of the novel, the narrator noting the potential ambiguity of Dürer's rendition of the miraculous vision, and perhaps relating to his own confusion.

Overall a worthwhile novel - perhaps a satire of an easy target of corporate art-washing and billionaire-survivalists, but with genuine depth, and a respectful artistic eye, from Eastham's immersion in the world of modern art.

[Joy D]

An unnamed first-person narrator writes an account of his time at the Floating World, a vast climate-controlled geodesic dome on an island off the coast of Greece, built long ago for a utopian community and fallen into disuse. A billionaire CEO is renovating it into a paradise for the wealthy, planning to sell residential units inside the dome as a refuge against the collapse of civilization. The setting is a dystopian version of our own world, where environmental disaster is well underway and economic failure looks imminent. The narrator is slow to realize there is more to the project than he was told.

The novel is concerned with the way the wealthy use art, class divides, social breakdown, and grief. I particularly enjoyed the writing, which is expressive and frequently witty. I was drawn in immediately and stayed curious about what was really going on beneath the surface. This is a book that requires the reader to assemble a lot of pieces into a whole, and the unsettling atmosphere holds it all together. I could feel the discomfort of existing in this world of natural and social breakdown.

The critique of the mega-rich is effective, especially when compared to the lives of the people doing the labor on the island. It extends to the narrator, whose own position is more compromised than he seems to understand, and watching him not quite see it is part of what makes the book so fascinating. This novel is extremely well crafted, and I need to keep Ben Eastham on my radar.

Many thanks to the publisher, author, and NetGalley for providing me with an advance reader's copy. This book is scheduled to be released on September 29, 2026.

[Movie Goer]

The idea for this book sounded really interesting, but for me the execution falls short. What the book does well is how art is perceived by different classes of people and what art means to different people. This makes sense given the author's background.
What doesn't work for me is the doomsday narrative and the characters. I didn't necessarily feel much tension except for hearing about events taking place, and didn't necessarily feel the characters either.
A good comparison point could be Megha Majumdar's climate novel 'A Guardian and A Thief' which tried to do something similar, in trying to draw blurry moral lines and tell a doomsday novel but does it better.
Another thing I noticed was towards the end of the book, there was something which felt like a typo where it said something like "unknown filmmaker who makes who makes".
I would like to thank NetGalley and Astra Publishing House for the advanced review copy of the book!

[emily]

3.5/5... I think?
Some of this might've gone over my head. Eastham is a skilled writer at the word level, and his prose kept me going through and otherwise dull book at times. I enjoyed some of the humor at the expense of "art people"; it definitely landed for me. I don't think Eastham's style will be for everyone, but I liked it quite a lot.
The story itself had a lot of missed potential. I don't think this book needed to be more fast-paced or explosive, as it's pretty quiet and understated, but I wish I cared more about the plot and some of the characters. As some other reviewers pointed out, I had a difficult time understanding the protagonist's grief for his late wife, Cora, and what happened to her that lead to her death (not a spoiler). I will happily give another novel by Ben Estham a shot if he decides to write one! This was still strong for a debut.
Thank you to the publisher for sending me a final copy!!! This was much appreciated. Astra House is cool

[Sharondblk]

The Floating World is set in a dystopian near future that already here - bushfires, heatwaves, climate refugees, the very very rich trying to work out a way out for themselves only. Unlike some of the recent dystopian fiction I've read recently our main character is not full of rage. He's just getting by in a difficult world, which he is on the inside of for the moment, but not part of. Some of this book is surprisingly funny (particularly the art stuff) some is deeply moving. He may not be reliable, but he certainly is relatable.
There is no info dumping here, just a slow reveal of the past, as the present becomes the future. It's a subtle, very well written meditation on the world we have built and what we may be building for the future.
Thanks to NetGalley and Astra Publishing house for the e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

[Xiibalba]

Dystopia is my favorite genre, so I really wanted to love this. A climate dome for billionaires on a Greek island, art as propaganda for the end of the world, mass migration in the background. On paper, that's exactly my kind of book.
In practice, it never comes together. The premise is doing all the work while the story drifts from one beautiful sentence to the next without ever committing to anything. The satire of wealth and the art world is sharp in places, but the plot it's attached to stays vague: the "deep currents of violence" we're promised never become anything concrete enough to feel dangerous, and the narrator is so passive that I stopped caring what he discovered. His grief, which should be the emotional core, is told more than felt.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC

[Tamara]

I really loved the writing style, the riveting storyline, the international art aspects, I was fully immersed in this narrative. I also appreciated that it was a linear narrative (except the Ireland chapter). So many modern novels take you through a dizzying amount of timelines and characters and this one instead just focused on telling the story. I loved the supernatural mystical elements regarding Cora; wish that some or most of them didn't also involve being on drugs to access them. People can have sober mystical encounters.
I realized about halfway through that I couldn't envision the dome or the island, or where the barriers were - he 'leaves the dome' to go swimming, I think? But would have loved a visual map to add to the story.

[Gergely]

The Floating World immediately caught my attention with its premise: a climate-controlled artistic enclave funded by a billionaire while the rest of the world faces environmental collapse. I was drawn in by its blend of climate fiction, art, wealth, and power, and I appreciated its ambitious themes around privilege, creativity, and culture in times of crisis. Ultimately, though, I never became emotionally invested in the characters, so the stakes never fully landed for me. While I admired the ideas, I wasn't as engaged by the story as I'd hoped to be.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Debbie]

I loved the book in the beginning it had great themes and very apt for the current age. It sort of lost me in the middle it felt a little meandering and the character became someone I didn’t like. Thank you to the author. Thank you to #netgalley and the publisher for an ARC.