Just when my thoughts were etching a loop as I struggled to describe Madeleine Thien’s new novel, The Book of Records, I came across this Joy Williams quotation*:

“What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibility of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes.”

That is, indeed, what Thien’s book does, including the element of darkness that comes from paying attention to everything in this world, something evident in Thien’s work from the beginning and throughout.

Years ago, I heard Thien read the opening of a story from Simple Recipes (2001) and I was drawn by the simple and powerful use of language and sensitive depiction of relationships, but it’s hard to express why I find her long-form work so…almost overwhelmingly satisfying.

After reading her previous novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016), I wrote three very long posts and, in the end, felt like I hadn’t succeeded in saying anything really.

So this time, I told myself, I would choose three passages (instead of three posts) and begin there.

These blue-covered books were a net that would suspend us outside the present.

The books are from a series titled The Great Lives of Voyagers, with foot-long maps that fold outward, and when Lina and her father left Foshan, they brought along volumes 3, 70, and 84 (about poet Du Fu, philosopher Baruch Spinoza, and writer Hannah Arendt).

She’s still very young, so her father reads to her from these books; when she is old enough to read them herself, she recognises that he made up some stories about these three historical figures. This habit of his slowed down time, Lina notes, so that they would “never run out of history, no matter how true or inaccurate it was”.

Lina and her father feel real, as does the environment they inhabit—with doors that are only visible after they have inhabited a space for a long time, with long days spent labouring to sell “found” items that other travellers require or desire.

The people they meet in this liminal space also feel real, even as they increasingly seem to echo the three figures in the Great Lives series. Which is all-the-more-striking given that the historical figures inhabited the 8th, 17th and 20th  centuries. And, given that other times and places emerge as Lina grows, as the novel unfolds, as when Hannah (yes, she occupies a place in the narrative too) reads Proust’s Time Regained, her copy acquired from another character whose presence haunts The Book of Records long after she has vanished.

Or maybe our moon was one piece of a vanished meteor. Or maybe the moon, a solitary wanderer, had drifted near to earth, and become caught in her orbit, their fates becoming one.

Several times while reading I returned to this passage about the moon, thinking about how people can be part of one another, can even be one piece of another person who has, since, vanished. But, also, how people can lack connection to one another until they collide, and how that intersection creates a new shape which, in turn, transforms both parties.

I thought about each of the characters, those who were literally linked by blood (those present, and those absent) and those who were drawn together by circumstance (sometimes horrifying, sometimes triumphant: sometimes both), and I wondered which elements were part of those three blue volumes and which were part of Lina’s memories (and which could be both).

I noticed the way that walls and spaces were both personal and historic: the father and daughter’s room unexpectedly connecting to their neighbour’s for instance, but also the Dzungarian Gate which is “like a thin doorway in a huge mountain wall”. The way that stories acted like gates, connected thoughts and ideas in unexpected ways, the way that one book can open into another.

Then, how some “rooms seemed cut loose from all that, drifting in some other world”. That’s how it feels now, much of the time, when following the news. When noting the absence of news, from places like Sudan and Ethiopia, right now. How war doesn’t necessary make anyone “braver, only more broken”. How limited our choices become: “If the law is lawless, a person can only become an outlaw ….” How so many variants of despair crowd across time and space.

Disjointed memories which hardly seemed to exist in the same earth or the same century, let alone the same life. Yet there they were, filling her thoughts as if they were a single image.

The Book of Records filled my thoughts for nearly three months. I read it like I usually read poetry, just a few pages at a time, often retracing my steps, feeling as though my brain processed the letters without reading the words. I blamed the wildfire smoke, and I flagged so many passages the bright colours looked like bunting on the edge of my book.

I was reminded of writers like Olga Tokarczuk, Dionne Brand, and Jon Kalman Steffanson. Of books like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, Miquel de Palol’s The Garden of Seven Twilights (Trans. Adrian Nathan West), and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West.

It feels like a book that happens to you, and I wonder what it’s like to write a book like that. I imagine it must feel a little like that last passage, with all the words and thoughts, all the memories and dreams, with them all swirling together as if they were a single story.

And, yet, somehow, I don’t feel like I’m caught up in the gust of it all, but as though the author is reaching out a hand, and I trust, if I just take another step, I will be secure in her grip. And everything will make sense.

*I happened on the quote at the beginning of the third chapter in Elissa Altman’s Permission (2025).