Time travel exquisitely interlaced in The Book Of Records

Past, present, future are porous and interlinked in Canadian writer Madeleine Thien's most ambitious novel yet

- Yeow Kai Chai

THE BOOK OF RECORDS By Madeleine Thien Fiction/Granta Books/Paperback/ 368 pages/$31.45 ★★★★ ☆

At the heart of Madeleine Thien's exquisitely interlaced fiction is a quest for knowing, the epistemological urge to unravel oneself, to study the patterns and, by extension, the wefts of one's existence. Are we the sum of our stories, incomplete and continually revisionist? Where is the line between myth-making and outright lies? Is truth a blanket term or full of holes?

The Book Of Records, her most ambitious novel, was name-checked in her much-feted title Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016), in which a tome of mysteriously coded stories is passed surreptitiously between generations as a way of keeping in touch. It is also "set in a future that hadn't yet arrived".

The Book Of Records here shares the title, but it is an entirely different thing, following Lina and her dissident father Wui Shin, who have escaped Foshan, China, to arrive at The Sea, a holding point for refugees in a climate-ravaged near future (itself inspired by Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong's now-defunct labyrinth of makeshift residences).