In anticipation of Madeleine’s appearance at the George Town Literary Festival (GTLF), she talks about her new novel, the writing process and her identity.[1]
IN MADELEINE THIEN’S 2016 Booker Prize-shortlisted Do Not Say We Have Nothing (DNSWHN), her characters covertly exchange a hand-copied book of records among themselves, within which messages and covert information are encoded beyond official surveillance. Literature is figured as offering a space of refuge for otherwise covert or sensitive matters, “until a day comes when they can be re-entered into the book of history”. This relationship between text and experience is expanded upon in her latest novel. DNSWHN’s book-within-a-book eventually lent itself to the title of The Book of Records (TBOR, 2025), which she candidly describes as a “strange” centuries-spanning set of stories-within-stories, weaving between speculation and history. Set in a near-future ravaged by climate change, TBOR is, at its core, a novel about interpretation. In focalising the life and thought of Spinoza, Du Fu and Hannah Arendt through the father-and-daughter pair at the novel’s core, Madeleine portrays literature as a living entity, the impact of which spans different times and spaces.
Gradually concretising over nine years, TBOR initially appears to depart from Madeleine’s past focus on lived memory: from Canada-set intergenerational experiences of migration to the Cambodian genocide and China’s Cultural Revolution. However, its focus on interpretation retains significant thematic continuities with earlier work. Indeed, Madeleine views her oeuvre as a metaphorical book of records, which collectively asks:
“…what it means to…keep a record of the times in which we are alive, sometimes through books, sometimes through music, sometimes through actions, sometimes through the ideas that pass from person-to-person.”
