Adjunct Associate Professor and alum Lynn Steger Strong '14 is set to release her fourth novel, The Float Test, on April 8 of 2025 through HarperCollins. The book explores themes of family, ambition, secrets, and love against the backdrop of a sweltering Florida summer.
The Float Test follows the Kenner siblings—Jenn, Fred, Jude, and George—as they reunite after a significant loss. Each sibling grapples with their own personal struggles: Jenn feels overwhelmed by family obligations, Fred is a novelist experiencing writer's block, Jude is a former corporate lawyer harboring resentment towards Fred, and George is estranged from his wife and concealing secrets about his former job.
As author Ann Napolitano notes, the adult Kenner children "gather on the hot ground of their childhood following their mother's death, where they try to untangle decades of betrayals and sorrow, and reclaim their sense of home." Xochitl Gonzalez, author of Anita de Monte Laughs Last, describes the novel as "an elegant reconstruction of an American family on the brink."
Strong's previous novels include Hold Still, Want, and Flight. Her non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Time, and The Paris Review, among other publications. In addition to her role at Columbia, she currently teaches writing at Princeton University.
Strong has been praised by reviewers as “an exacting observer of families and their idiosyncrasies, in the mode of Anne Tyler and Jonathan Franzen," (The Washington Post) as well as for her "distinctive prose style—compressed, telegraphic and gestural, one in which the sharp noticing of what might otherwise seem like ordinary details about a character or an exchange takes on a resonating depth" (The New York Times).
