The Floating Man could be a good read for someone who appreciates deeply introspective and subtle poetry about the natural world and human experience. Katharine Towers' debut novel beautifully explores the relationship between the body and nature, through the use of music as a vehicle to express the inexpressible emotional shifts of our lives. The book provides an excellent opportunity for reflection and self-exploration, with every poem being a work of art in its own right.

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• Guardian First Book Award Nominee for Longlist (2010)

Appropriately for a book haunted by music, Katharine Towers’ poems exhibit an almost pianistic sense of timing, touch and tone. In The Floating Man, Towers writes about weight and weightlessness, presence and absence, the body in space, and our oblique relationship with the natural world, always with a wonderful sense of compositional balance; she is expert at registering the huge emotional shifts effected by the smallest things, whether the scent of apples, the slant of the light, or the grace-notes of memory. Music expresses the things we cannot say, but Towers recruits its power to bring the beyond-words into the realm of speech. The result is a debut of great originality and subtlety.

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