Arriving migrants dispute which sea they’ve disembarked from. Lina calls it the South China Sea, while a neighbor says it’s the Baltic — he’d “know that blue anywhere.” Among Lina’s neighbors are a 17th-century Dutch scholar named Bento, a 20th-century philosopher named Blucher, and a poet from the Tang Dynasty named Jupiter. “The buildings of the Sea are made of time,” says Lina’s father. Madeleine Thien’s inventive and ambitious fourth novel, “ The Book of Records ,” opens with maximum intrigue. A seven-year-old Chinese girl named Lina disembarks from a sea vessel with her father to find shelter in an...
Monitoring Antisemitism Intel
