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The Guardian Weekly

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May 30, 2025

In near-future China, a girl and her father flee from flooding in a rich fable of migration

- By Xan Brooks

The sea takes many forms in fiction. It was an adventure playground in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island and a rowdy neighbour in Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn. It played the wine-dark seducer in Homer’s Odyssey and the snot-green tormentor in Joyce’s Ulysses. But while its colour can change and its humour may vary, its fictional properties remain reassuringly stable.

The sea is our unconscious, a repository of memory, the beginning and end of all things. It’s what Jules Verne described as the “Living Infinite”.

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