Loyalty to Language: A Conversation with Madeleine Thien

The prolific fiction writer Madeleine Thien speaks to Jeremy Tiang about her latest novel, The Book of Records, where a young girl takes refuge in a structure called the Sea — resembling the Kowloon Walled City if it were 'adrift in time and space'. There, her life melds with three characters analogous to Du Fu, Baruch Spinoza, and Hannah Arendt. The interview further explores Thien's earlier books, her relationships to her characters and stories, grief, and the impact of genocide – in both Cambodia and Palestine – on her thinking and practice. This is an extract from our Spring 2026 issue, Wasafiri 125.

Download the full interview for free during March 2026, or read it in Wasafiri 125 in print.

Shortly after the start of my Zoom call with Madeleine Thien, I noticed the room perceptibly darkening around her. Montreal was experiencing an apocalyptic rainstorm, she explained. We soldiered on through the rumbling deluge, though she did have to jump up at one point to make sure the windows were keeping the rain at bay. 

This felt like an appropriately unstable setting for our conversation about Madeleine’s latest novel, The Book of Records (Granta, 2025), where a young girl named Lina and her father are refugees in a structure known as the Sea that somewhat resembles the Kowloon Walled City — if the Kowloon Walled City were adrift in time and space. Lina has only managed to bring with her three books from a 90-volume series of biographies, The Great Lives of Voyagers, depicting Du Fu, Baruch Spinoza, and Hannah Arendt. As it happens, the three people she grows closest to in the Sea – Jupiter, Bento, and Blucher – each turn out to be an analogue for one of these figures. 

Passages from the lives of these historical figures are interspersed with the unpredictable existence of the Sea, where fascinating characters are glimpsed and never seen again, and Lina’s existence is both in stasis and endlessly shifting — an unmoored and displaced life. We also see an older version of Lina five decades in the future, journeying back to the Sea from an unnamed place where she has ended up after what another character calls ‘an odyssey’ and Lina herself describes as an ‘outward journey, with many stops along the way’.  

I have been an admirer of Madeleine’s work for a long time, from the more historically-grounded early novels, Certainty and Dogs at the Perimeter, to the free-wheeling and fable-like Do Not Say We Have Nothing, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016. The Book of Records feels like a step into a more metaphysical realm, even as it retains her focus on the complex entanglements that history, family, and immigration can enmesh us within. 

We spoke for over an hour, with a short break to admire the cats of the friends I was staying with. It felt like we were only scratching the surface, but as Jupiter says towards the end of the novel, ‘There aren’t enough days to finish the story.’ The Book of Records resists easy closure — and any conversation about it can only open up many more questions than it resolves. 

As our conversation drew to an end, so did the thunderstorm. Madeleine smiled and waved goodbye as the wall behind her lightened. I clicked the screen off and found myself back in my sun-drenched world, dazed and enlightened. 

By Jeremy Tiang

Jeremy Tiang: It’s hard to know where to start with The Book of Records, a capacious, non-linear narrative with no easy answers, but I always felt like I was being expertly guided through this maze that I might never fully comprehend. What was your entry point?

Madeleine Thien: The very beginning was reaching the end of Do Not Say We Have Nothing and thinking I might never again experience the way this novel had lived in me. It was different from my previous books — I had a feeling of mourning, missing the characters, and not understanding how the process had happened. In those first few years of writing, I was thinking a lot about who I wanted to live with for the next five to ten years.

Around 2018, when I was feeling my way through a new book, I rented an apartment in Brooklyn because I was starting a teaching job at Brooklyn College. I bought a card table with four chairs at Housing Works and thought: maybe if I set up the table just right, they’ll come and sit with me. My father had died at the end of 2017, and both my parents were gone. I was slowly returning to the land of the living. 

JT: How did you choose which three characters Lina would bring with her? Early in the book, Lina mentions other volumes she wished they’d brought with them, such as ‘the Ming dynasty sailor Zheng He’ or ‘the tireless wanderer Ibn Battuta’. I wondered whether you pursued any of these other threads, or if it was always Arendt, Spinoza, and Du Fu.

MT: In different drafts, we saw more of Lina moving through the buildings of the Sea, running errands for more people, some of whom were borrowed from the past. It’s a surprise to me that these three ended up being the ones who persisted, draft after draft. It was almost as if these were the three who knew how to live in these rooms. In the end what made them persist was their interest in talking with one another. With other figures, I would have had to build a different kind of accommodation for them. There were so many others I had imagined in this space. I meant to have musicians. I really wanted more musicians.

JT: Was it because of the chemistry that these three figures shared?

MT: Yes, I always felt that Hannah Arendt has a certain irritation with Spinoza, but there's mutual respect. In earlier drafts, everyone's sections were much longer … the book could easily have spiraled into a thousand pages. In the end, Du Fu became for me the quiet centre of the book, even though the Hannah Arendt figure takes up the most pages and is the most forceful personality. But there's something about Du Fu that binds all the pieces together.

JT: It felt very organic, by which I mean if you were setting out with particular themes in mind, you probably wouldn't have settled on these three, but they just feel right. And it’s not very schematic. I’m the sort of writer who would have felt the need to give them all equal page lengths, but you didn’t. 

MT: I actually had a pie chart at one point. I tried to equalise. Then, late in the process, I threw out the entire draft and built it all over again.

It was different from my previous books — I had a feeling of mourning, missing the characters, and not understanding how the process had happened.  

JT: I thought they balanced each other beautifully. And we do get glimpses of other figures, for example, Walter Benjamin is alluded to, even though we don't really meet him except in Hannah's imagination.

MT: Yes, that was one of the greatest pleasures: how their worlds gather other people and other experiences, both imagined and real. Even with the imagined people, I felt like there must have been this kind of person, this kind of encounter, in their lives. 

JT: How much research did you have to do? Were you already conversant with these three figures, or was the novel an excuse to research people you’d always wanted to look into?

MT: The only parameter I set for myself was that I wanted the historical figures who pass through the doors of the Sea to be people whose work had lived in me for a long time. People who felt very alive to me, but also maybe had shaped me in ways I couldn't see, for better or for worse. I had been reading all three for decades. In the beginning, I knew them through their work, but I didn't always know a lot about their lives.

JT: I love the idea of their work leading you into their lives. Was there anything in your research that you didn’t expect?

MT: I noticed that Baruch Spinoza was always living in noisy accommodations, always with landlords and in houses with seven, eight, nine kids running around. He's come down to us through history as a solitary man, grinding lenses, serious and quiet. I love the thought of him writing Ethics in an extremely noisy household. I lived in the Netherlands for a few years, and something that has stayed with me is the loudness of the children. They're free-spirited and rambunctious. I understood that, for all these figures, their life of contemplation or poetic practice or philosophical practice was intertwined with the world. The world was never shut out from any of them.

JT: I loved your LitHub essay about co-existing with Spinoza. It really felt like you had gotten to know him and the other two intimately.  

MT: Yes, I thought of it as friendship and companionship. That was maybe the biggest transgression, to take these major figures – whose ideas have shaped so much in philosophy, politics, and poetry – and to place them as equals with a fourteen-year-old girl.

I understood that, for all these figures, their life of contemplation or poetic practice or philosophical practice was intertwined with the world.  

JT: Did it feel like you had the freedom to do that because they’re so well known, and someone who occupies that much space in our shared culture becomes almost like public property? Also, anyone could easily look up the ‘official’ versions of their lives if they wanted to.

MT: I think you're right. Subconsciously, I probably only could have done it with figures who, in a sense, had had their say. And interestingly, I couldn't do it with figures who had written in detail about their private lives. Du Fu may be an outlier here, but especially with Hannah Arendt, she was conscious of what belonged to the private world, and she protected that. A lot of Spinoza's private letters were burned after he died because of the accusations of heresy against him, and to protect the Spinoza circle ...

Read the full interview here, free to access and download for the month of March 2026 only.