When Madeleine Thien accepted the 2024 Writers’ Trust Engel Findley Award, given to midcareer fiction writers from Canada, she turned to “Being a Person,” a poem by William Stafford with closing lines that in many ways encapsulate the themes of her most recent novel, The Book of Records, forthcoming in May from W. W. Norton: “How you stand here is important. How you / listen for the next things to happen. How you breathe.” Set in an unknown future and a labyrinthine migratory way station called “the Sea,” The Book of Records is the story of fourteen-year-old Lina and her father, refugees whose situation is revealed slowly throughout the novel. In the Sea, a place described as “made of time,” many come and go, including three characters based on the seventeenth-century Jewish scholar Baruch Spinoza, twentieth-century philosopher Hannah Arendt, and eighth-century Chinese poet Du Fu. Thien brings Lina into their lives through shifts in history, time, and space as she continues to explore what it means to “stand”: to make ethical decisions that guide actions, that lead to a life filled with purpose and meaning, and that offer hope amid seemingly hopeless circumstances.
Madeleine Thien, author of the novel The Book of Records. (Credit: Andrew Querner)
In The Book of Records, as in her earlier work, Thien takes on political, historical, and philosophical issues in the wake of catastrophes not in the abstract but through the lives of those who experience them. Her first novel, Certainty (Little, Brown, 2006), follows a documentary producer seeking to understand her father's time living in Japanese-occupied Malaysia. Dogs at the Perimeter (Granta Books, 2011) centers on the Cambodian Genocide of the 1970s and was shortlisted for Berlin’s International Literature Prize. Her third novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing (Norton, 2016), is set during the Cultural Revolution in China and culminates with the protests in Tiananmen Square. It received the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award and was a finalist for the Booker Prize. While philosopher Immanuel Kant did not make it into Thien’s cast of characters in her new novel, she cites him as the throughline of all her books, each one probing “the old questions as phrased by Kant: What can I know, what must I do, what can I hope.”
Thien grew up in Vancouver, a child of several cultures. Her mother was a Cantonese speaker from Hong Kong while her father was Hakka, ethnically Chinese but born in a part of Malaysia that was once the British protectorate of north Borneo. Her parents met as students in Australia, settled in Malaysia, left because of the political instability, and emigrated to Vancouver in 1974, the year she was born. Their plans to open a Chinese Canadian diner failed, and, Thien says, the family struggled financially as she grew up. A talented dancer, she won a scholarship to Simon Fraser University but lost it, she says, when she became “distracted by words.” After working for several years in a variety of jobs, she was offered a scholarship to study creative writing in the MFA program at the University of British Columbia. Subsequently, she moved from western Canada to Montreal, currently her home base.
Author and scholar Xu Xi describes Thien as “unique as an international Asian Canadian writer [who is] unafraid to take on political issues.” Xu Xi, who was founding director of the international MFA program at the City University of Hong Kong (which closed in 2015), praises Thien as a brilliant teacher with a profound body of work that is “very true to the transnational experience,” likely the reason her compelling novels have been translated into twenty-five languages. In addition to Canada and China, Thien has taught in Germany, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe. From 2018 to 2024 she was a professor of English at Brooklyn College at the City University of New York.
The Book of Records is not for the faint of heart. Thien did an enormous amount of research into philosophy, art, and history, and the novel takes on emotional weight both in the family story and the overall contexts of displacement, migration, and authoritarian rule. Yet, far from being a polemic, it is written in a lyrical style that draws readers in. Contemporary Chinese American novelist Weike Wang cites the “lightness” and “natural musicality” of Thien’s prose as “a remarkable blend of storytelling and scholarship.” Wang also points out that efforts to categorize The Book of Records as historical fiction, sci-fi, or dystopian or even speculative fiction are futile—and Thien agrees: “I have no idea what to call it. It’s a novel. I’ve always been interested in the mutability of the novel, how much it contains, and what keeps it so alive is that it takes so many forms into itself. I just love the big welcoming garment of the novel!”
The following interview took place over Zoom and e-mail during March and April 2025 while Thien was in New York City.
Last November, when the Writers’ Trust honored you, you explained that “this beautiful prize has given me another kind of gift, the gift of returning it to the world.” You are dividing the $25,000 prize money among the Woodcock Fund, which supports an emergency fund for writers, the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund, and the Lebanese Red Cross. How did you decide to make such a generous gesture—and why these three organizations?
I’d known about this award, and I always thought that to be honored by your peers in midcareer for what was done and to encourage further work is incredibly moving. But there was so much going on in the world, and I felt there were others in greater need than me at that moment in time. I wanted to be able to support people who were trying to give aid to those suffering. Over the years I’ve known people in the most dire circumstances who’ve turned to the Writers’ Trust Emergency Relief Fund. I thought, “Here’s this fund working in the background, supported by volunteers and donations, that probably has made a more meaningful contribution to many writers in our literary ecosystem—quietly, because when writers receive it, situations are so private; financial crises, loss of home, medical emergencies—there is very little talk about it.” I wanted to shine some light on that, the kinds of things that hold community together.
We were seeing images of the Lebanese Red Cross going into incredibly dangerous conditions so that even in the act of trying to help people they were risking so much. The Lebanese government had been under such strain and collapse and difficulty for so many years. It’s a complex place, multidenominational, with many different communities—a place so necessary to the stability of the whole region. Like many others, I felt broken and helpless day after day seeing images of Israel’s collective punishment of Gaza and Palestinians. Having spent time in the West Bank in 2016 when I was invited by Jewish writers and Israeli and Palestinian peace activists, I also felt responsibility because I had witnessed injustice with my own eyes.
Your third novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing was published in 2016, a year short of being a decade ago. What about The Book of Records needed this amount of time to make it into the world?
After 2016 I felt like the ground was shifting very quickly in my personal life and in the world. I had spent the previous ten years writing about very difficult subjects and places that had meant a lot to me—the genocide in Cambodia and political events in China. I had a lot of questions for myself about how I had come to believe the things I believed. What kinds of things didn’t I see? What kinds of things was I only just grasping now in my forties?
When I started writing I didn’t understand what the Sea was. All I knew was that it was a building made of time. I think a lot of the nine years was spent on the frame of the story. I was writing a lot about Spinoza, Arendt, and Du Fu—those parts kept going forever. It was like three hallways I could just follow endlessly and that would lead me away from the center of the book, which was the Sea. I thought I was writing four novels at once without realizing it. I probably did write each one as a novel in itself without realizing it. But I kept coming back because to me it was so important to show how they were in relation to one another, how they overlapped, and how they threaded through each other.
I’d say even until year seven and a half or eight, I thought I might have to throw the book away because I couldn’t make it come together. People who read it were very gentle with me, saying, “It’s not working, beautiful passages, but it’s just not working.” It took me a long time to turn a corner with it and feel like I’d found a way to pull it into one thread. Even now, I think it’s quite fragile.
You’ve said that Kowloon Walled City inspired the setting of the novel: “the Sea” is a floating building, a way station where people from different times and places take refuge, some remaining for a brief time, others for years. Reading about this actual place, I learned it was a huge collection of small houses atop one another in Hong Kong that was never part of the British colonial government—an anomaly where at one point more than 35,000 people lived as part of a community that has been variously described as chaotic, lawless, yet vibrant and thriving. How did this historical place, which was demolished in the early 1990s, inspire you?
It’s quite close to where my mother grew up—she grew up in Kowloon, but [the walled city] is not a place she had ever been. I heard about it in 2002; that was the first time I’d been to Hong Kong, about three months after my mother passed away very suddenly. She was supposed to make that trip with me, and it would be my first time in China and the first time she’d been back in decades. It might be that the trip was so emotional because I was looking for these places of my mother’s childhood and youth, so something about Kowloon imprinted on me. I was also aware of what I couldn’t see because she was not there to show me. I was a stranger in a way, wandering through a place where I didn’t know the landmarks.
Then I was working in Hong Kong in 2010 for five years, going back and forth for the low-residency MFA program. I spent more time in Hong Kong, and I had found that well-known book with the photographs [City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City by Ian Lambot], and it just stayed with me. I think what’s clear from these images, those histories and the narratives, is the worlds within worlds within worlds in this densely packed place felt like something both historical and futuristic. It seemed to transcend even the moment it was in. It reminded me of all the places of temporary dwelling whether temporary way stations that spring up, places that spring up around a port and then they’re gone, or refugee camps. I thought there was something recurring about this place. When I was thinking about a building made of time, I just kept returning to its hallways. Also, because things were built over time by people who were not engineers or architects or even building-construction people, there’s a dangerous haphazard but ingenious structure to it. There’s nothing linear about it, things come out of other things; it’s a maze. I remember reading about the postal worker and the way he had to remember how he could deliver mail through this building. It was fascinating, and for a long time there was a postal worker in the Sea. But in all the various attempts to bring this thing to life, eventually the postal worker didn’t come any more.
You’ve described the Sea as “history itself, as memory, a container, and a passageway. Lina’s father tells her, “the Sea is a length of string crossing over itself.” Maybe I’m trying to conjure up a physical image of it, but how can it encapsulate all of these?
I think the nature of this is going to be open to every reader’s interpretation—what kind of place this is, what Lina’s father is telling her, and how she understands it as a child. I’d always been interested in physicists telling us that time and space are the same. Some will go so far as to tell us that there is no such thing as time as we understand it. And Einstein sees “spacetime” as one entity. I understand what they’re saying in relation to what they’re working out, but then what does that mean for us who live in time, a very human concept of time? I thought, What would it look like if space was time itself? That’s what I was trying to tease out with this structure of the Sea.
Amid the speculation and philosophy of your novel, there’s a classic father-daughter story. In this case, the father worked in cyberspace first for and then against the Chinese government, and the central mystery, if you will, is that he and Lina are refugees in the Sea, separated from Lina’s mother, brother, and aunt. Her longing for them is a tender thread as she moves between confidence and doubt that they will ultimately be reunited. During most of the novel, Lina is fourteen, an age you’re described as a “precipice.” What does that mean in terms of the primary voice in the novel?
It was something also that was there from the beginning for me: the Sea—whatever it was—and this girl, this young woman, on that threshold. I think “precipice” is very concrete at fourteen because it is the year she will leave, the year when she has to gather up everything that was given to her—and everything that has been taken away from her, but in the case of Lina she focuses on the given—to give it its proper place in herself. She has been so open to the stories of others, such a collector, a gatherer, listener, questioner. She has that beautiful curiosity that seems to spring from children at certain times of their lives. And then she has to contain it somehow so that she can leave and carry it but not be weighed down by it. That threshold is something I feel we all pass through at some point: how to be loyal to what was given to us, how to be the daughter but finally how to begin to create one’s own life. It’s hard because it means turning your back sometimes on the given. I think at fourteen that openness and the closing is something that solidifies around that time. It’s always there, of course, but maybe at that age one becomes conscious of it around those years. I feel like I could write about fourteen-year-olds forever. They spring up a lot in my work—subconsciously.
At one point in the novel Lina asserts, “What I yearn for is something eternal, which I have named education.” But what exactly does education mean to her? It’s certainly not formal schooling, and sometimes it’s random as those three books, The Great Lives of Voyagers, from a volume of encyclopedias brought with her to the Sea that she reads and rereads.
It’s that intense hunger, that feeling that she needs it like she needs bread. In that longing, she’s open to it wherever she finds it, the people she meets, even in the briefest of encounters. I like your question about what education even is. I think because she has so little—so few books, no school—she makes this connective tissue out of it all. It’s a very Hannah Arendt idea of how one is going to belong to the world. It’s both our only home, and our temporary home. How do we face our belonging to it? Lina tries to do it through what she calls education. At some point there’s a Du Fu poem that arises in someone else’s typewriter and he talks about what he wants most is to make a mansion of ten thousand rooms for whoever needs a home in it. I think that’s how Lina starts to see education. Maybe Lina senses that part of what she means by education is what it means to have an ethics; how does one make a choice even in the most difficult circumstances? What is this compass and where does it come from? Does it come from the books, or does it come from something else that one has to nurture in oneself?
I read that Lina and the Sea was the original working title for the novel—which seems to make sense given that we stay with her for fifty years. When and why did it change to The Book of Records?
I seem to have been maybe the only person who loved that title! It was my working title for so long, maybe because it connected with the fourteen-year-old girl. I wanted this title that would feel accessible, almost simple—like The Great Lives of Voyagers. I just kept getting asked to think about different titles. At least in my head, conceptually, I knew it was a form of The Book of Records, which is the book that shows up in Do Not Say We Have Nothing. It’s a novel that seems to have no beginning and no end. The family copies it by hand because they love the novel, and they want to give it to those they love. At a certain point along the way, they begin to hide real names and real places inside it—things that cannot be spoken, too sensitive, too dangerous, too political. They’re not in the official record. They’re hidden in literature in the hope that one day when the times change again, those true names and true deeds will find their rightful place in history.
Let’s go back to the historical figures: Spinoza, Hannah Arendt, and Du Fu. They exist in the novel both as themselves and as central characters seeking refuge in the Sea as Bento, Blucher, and Jupiter, respectively. How/why did you choose these three?
I had different ideas about who would inhabit the Sea. When I started in 2016, I was thinking it would take me a long time, maybe five years at least, and who do I want to spend the next five years thinking with—my companions during this time as I try to understand what this book is. Different thinkers and writers sort of took up residence, but I couldn’t make anyone stay in the building. There had to be something in it for them, which I found fascinating in my relation as novelist working quietly with these people inhabiting the page. These three seemed the most interested in having a conversation with each other and with Lina. They had time for this fourteen-year-old. I suspect it has something to do with the voices they have in their writing—Spinoza’s letters, Hannah’s letters, and Du Fu’s poems. Each had this profound desire to communicate their ideas and to do it across different registers. I think most people would find that surprising with Spinoza because The Ethics is so difficult to read, but the very few letters that were saved—his friends destroyed so many because they feared for themselves and for his legacy as well—show his real belief that there was something we could understand about our condition that is available to anyone who wished to ask those questions. Hannah has that in books like Between Past and Future; she’s trying to communicate not a systematic way of thinking but the activity of thinking itself. One does not need to agree with her, but I think she really wants to open this dialogue between the self and other and within the self. For all these reasons, they were willing teachers, willing neighbors, willing companions, willing to laugh at themselves and each other.
You did so very much research, yet out of that research emerges something so vital. Your depiction of these characters makes us interact with them, we get attached, and yet that came from the academic activity of research. But then you transformed it. It’s remarkable.
The fear that I had was also tied up with the hope that I had for the book. I’m not a philosopher or poet. I have no training in any of these things. When I read Spinoza and Arendt, it was as an ordinary person picking up a book and wanting to understand something. It’s the scary part of writing a book like this because the world is full of experts. To echo your question of why those three, I felt that they wanted to be read by the person who wants to understand something of this life.
Another trinity, if you will, is the three-part structure of the novel: Lina, The Ethics, Wei. Did you foresee this organization from the start, or how did it evolve?
I always knew that the father’s story would be in the middle. I felt there were sort of passageways that Lina has to go through to reach her father’s story and then passageways out to help her live with what she has learned. That’s all I knew. I didn’t know how the rest would interweave. Part of the structure is an echo of the Sea itself, this string folded over itself. Because I had written so much about music in Do Not Say We Have Nothing, maybe I was looking for some musical motif. I knew I was asking a lot of the readers as we moved between these centuries, but I hoped some patterning would allow them to relax into the structure and trust it as I hoped I would learn to trust it. I think the final form came late in the process.
Trying to bring it all together, I was thinking of my father. I almost never left his side in the last ten days of his life [in 2017], as he came in and out of consciousness, and as he entered another consciousness. I knew that each time he came to, he was hearing another conversation and that many memories from the past were surfacing. He was in all times, in all moments, as if standing at the root of his life. He was in the Sea, a sea that belonged to him alone. It was the hardest thing to go through, accompanying him to the end, but also perhaps this is the most profound gift we give to those we love, to walk with them until the end, to hold their hands as they make the passage.
You’ve talked about The Book of Records in terms of riddle and paradox. Are you reminding us of the importance of being able to hold two conflicting thoughts in mind at once? That seems part of what Lina’s learning without knowing she’s learning it.
That’s a great observation. Lina realizes that her father “was pulling my leg and also that he was being truthful.” Under the text that is explicitly stated in the book is the Tao Te Ching texts because each couplet is a paradox, such as “heavy is the root of light.”
What about the riddle? Don’t riddles have answers?
A riddle has an answer but not necessarily one we can figure out. I do think the Sea is a bit of a riddle; each reader will either find a home in the riddle or not.
Speaking of riddles and paradoxes, you’ve named Italo Calvino, Jorges Luis Borges, and Yoko Ogawa as significant influences. I’d like to hear what they’ve meant to you as a writer—and thinker—in general as well as for The Book of Records.
They do the impossible. I feel those three give me such courage. We’re such different writers, and they are so different from one another, but they all do something with the narrative and the text and structure that one feels they shouldn’t be able to pull off. There’s a magic. It’s a question of form and their skill, of course, but there’s something about their spirit, their relationship with those characters. Calvino [in Invisible Cities] creates these things that only exist in the mind, these incredible cities that keep unfolding like origami. But they’re all descriptions of the human condition in a way. All their work is so bold and fearless and yet so kind.
The more deeply I got into the novel, the more I felt it was set right here and now—the aftermath of a worldwide epidemic, the rise of autocracies, the environmental crises of the planet itself, the threat to free and open dialogue, shifting migratory patterns. Just a few examples: “The unthinkable became regular, the new regular became unthinkable.” And later: “The older generation controls the structures of this country…but the younger generation controls its culture. The structure and culture exist in disequilibrium, and this imbalance is the engine of political change.” I’m especially intrigued by Benji (based on Walter Benjamin, I believe), who asserts, “[I]n all times, and not just ours, catastrophe is the rule, not the exception.” Part of what you seem to be guiding us to think about—without explicitly making an argument—is that we are not living through exceptional times; we are in fact living in unexceptional times. Am I reading it too narrowly, or are these ideas at the heart of your novel?
Devastating, isn’t it?
Yes and no—because survival is on the other side of catastrophe, “the unthinkable” or “disequilibrium.”
For some, but not for all. That’s the heartache of it. When I was thinking of this building made of time, I was thinking that all these disasters will feel like the past for Du Fu and those other characters. But in this building made of time, which is our world, it’s happening to someone right now, somewhere. Someone is losing their home; someone is facing a catastrophic civil war. Depending upon the reader at the moment, it will feel like the past, or oncoming future coming at a collision force; for another reader, it will be their present moment. The realization coming to me as I was writing about these different times was that I was always writing about someone’s present. That was quite painful, but made it feel all the more necessary to bring them into one space so that it could be all our ongoing present or ongoing past that has never ended. But then it became ever more important to ask ourselves, what is my ethical choice at this moment? What becomes clear is that there is no such thing as an ethical person; there’s an ethical choice to be made in each moment, and once you’ve made one doesn’t mean you’re ethical forever—very Hannah Arendt. It’s what we do. Our actions are the ways we insert ourselves into this world. There was never a moment in the nine years when it didn’t feel I was writing about the present, and it only got more and more so as things became more and more personal for me.
I’d like to circle back to the epigraph at the start of the novel: “I require a Thou to become; becoming I, I say Thou. / All actual life is encounter.” Blucher (Arendt) tells Lina something that seems similar, “Every person is housed in the word ‘I’ and the word ‘you.’” Later, the older Lina pages through her father’s university notebooks, reflecting, “[I] lose myself in the words I and you, I and thou.” Is this recurring allusion a sign of hope or is it more “hopeless hope”? In a recent Instagram post, you wrote that “hopeless hope” captures much of what The Book of Records is about. You quote David Shulman in Freedom and Despair: Notes From the South Hebron Hills: “It is in the nature of acting, of doing the right thing, that despair recedes at least for a moment, and its place is taken by something else: hopeless hope.”
I think the hopeless hope resonates with me because it’s a clear-eyed hope. It’s not a looking away hope but looking at the thing we are most afraid of and retaining hope. A thread throughout the novel is the ways in which these three [Spinoza, Arendt, and Du Fu] at different times are saved by others whose names are lost or not recorded. More than being great voyagers, their lives are a record of how many people, even complete strangers, stepped in to save them. When Lina thinks about her brother, she tells the little girl, he was saved and when he could, he tried to save others. That is what she’s carrying from all these stories about how she’s going to live in this world. Even in a world that might be collapsing in so many ways around her, there’s still this choice that’s hers to make each time. I do actually find it a hopeful book because of how much we are able to carry and this choice of what we decide we are going to carry into the future and what kind of ideas we want to live out in practice in life so that they can also be carried forward.
As you’re saying that I think you’ve just described yourself as you gifted the stipend from your recent award—your ethical choice.
Little by little, we’re all trying.
So, to go a step further, this novel privileges friendship as almost a spiritual bond. Blucher observes, “I think friendship is time itself…I think friendship is the homeland.” During her journey to America, Arendt is told, “In times like these, friendship is one of the only certainties people can give each other.” And at the end, Lina turns friendship into family. All of this sounds positive even in a pretty bleak world of struggle, loss, and suffering. Am I on the right track here or just reading what right now I am almost desperate to believe?
These bonds which otherwise seem so fragile are actually what will get us through in the end. For those who survive catastrophe, it will be because someone saved them. These loyalties to another life, to the idea of a friendship, to what it means to us—without that, no one survives.
You’ve described yourself as both “an idealist and a pessimist.” Which way are you leaning at this moment?
I am not a pessimist at this moment but maybe for a very pragmatic reason. It might come from the years of teaching. I don’t feel that I have the right to be pessimistic—this generation, these younger kids, what they’re facing, what they’re seeing of the political world. I think there is an obligation not just to hope but to hold the hopeless hope, which means you have to act—somehow. We have to keep talking about these things and not be afraid.
Writer and educator Renée H. Shea has contributed extensively to Poets & Writers Magazine, including profiles of Edwidge Danticat (September/October 2024) and Julia Phillips (July/August 2024). A number of her interviews appear in World Literature Today, most recently a conversation with Dinaw Mengestu (March/April 2025). She is currently doing a series for the American Book Review on “The Laureates.” She also coauthors English language arts textbooks for Bedford, Freeman & Worth.
EXCERPT
Half a century ago, during the rainy season, when I was seven years old, my father and I reached the Sea. It was evening and the buildings were coloured glass against the night. I remember that we disembarked into water, we crossed the sand, we entered a pale door of the Sea. Inside, the hallways were noisy and hot, there were people everywhere, and I wanted to escape to the open air. But my father found a room in which we and others could shelter. For a day, perhaps even two, I slept.
When I awoke, I saw my father standing at the window, mesmerized by something I couldn’t see or hear. His yellow sweater glowed in the blue light.
Within days, the people we had met on our voyage began to depart. They crowded onto small boats which carried them out to cargo ships which, little by little, slid behind the horizon. But we remained. My father had been ill and needed time to recover. Next week, he said, or the week after, we could set off again, and rejoin those who had gone ahead.
Near the beach, by an entrance known as West Gate, the rooms were full, but further away we discovered abandoned buildings. Every night, we moved deeper into the enclave. According to rumours, this place had started as a military outpost. The empire to which it belonged had crumbled and the outpost, over centuries, had fallen outside the control of nearby countries, becoming a no man’s land. People who needed to disappear, or who had no other nation, began to take refuge here; they constructed dwellings atop dwellings, until hundreds of buildings appeared to wrap around, and even through, one another. These people named their home the Sea. But that was long ago and the former inhabitants, as many as sixty thousand, had scattered to places unknown.
Whole buildings now stood deserted, their roofs collapsed by storms. Some had a feeling of permanent night; some became lively neighbourhoods, brought momentarily to life by families who arrived and departed together. Several times, my father and I walked for hours, never turning or doubling back, but somehow found ourselves standing back at West Gate. It was impossible. We learned that the simplest way to navigate the enclave was over the rooftops, which made a kind of patchwork road across the Sea.
From The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien. Copyright © 2025 by Madeleine Thien. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
