THE BOOK OF RECORDS

Madeleine Thien

From the author of the Booker-shortlisted Do Not Say We Have Nothing – a masterful novel that melds speculative and historical fiction, and confronts urgent questions about migration and environmental crisis.

In the near future, Lina and her ailing father take refuge in a liminal enclave called the Sea, a staging post between migrations that seems unmoored from time and space. They might be on the shores of the Baltic, or perhaps the Pacific; their neighbours include those cast adrift by crises deep in the past.

Their closest companions, though, are Hannah Arendt, Baruch Spinoza, and the poet Du Fu: the subjects of the only books our companions have with them. As father and daughter read, re-read and embellish their stories, Thien weaves vividly fictionalised biographies of these three figures. In the process, Lina comes to understand the role of fate and ideas in history, as well as the cost wrought on her family by her father’s betrayals.

The result is a hugely ambitious, deeply moving intellectual adventure that blurs fact and fiction, spans centuries and continents, and explores exile and homecoming. The Book of Records shows the great novelist Madeleine Thien at her most enriching.

Granta Books (publisher’s description)