Thien, Madeleine
Entry updated 26 May 2025. Tagged: Author.
(1974- ) Canadian author, active from 2000 or before; her early work, all nonfantastic, established her as an author of cultural significance whose novels – like Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016) – feelingly and with a mature grasp of storytelling unpack the complex quasi-diasporal life of the vast cohort of people who must braid multi-cultural lives in lands that are "theirs" but not theirs. Thien herself is Canadian-born to a mother from Malaysia and a father from Hong Kong. She is of sf interest for her fourth novel, The Book of Records (2025), a Near Future tale set mostly in a vast coercive Keep, the Labyrinthine "Sea", which houses huge numbers of migrants. The protagonist braids together her multiply complex intimate life and the history of recent civilization through her study of a series of books known as The Great Lives of Voyagers: the voyagers who in this context preserve the world being Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), Du Fu (712-770) and Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677). Different storeys or aspects of the "Sea" itself provide a kind of son et lumiere of these lives, due to the fact that "the buildings of the Sea are made of time". [JC]
Madeleine Thien
born Vancouver, British Columbia: 25 May 1974
works (selected)
- The Book of Records (Toronto, Ontario: Knopf Canada, 2025) [hb/]
links
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