The Book of Records
By Madeleine Thien
W. W. Norton & Company
If you see Ms. Thien’s other book below, you can be excused for thinking that this one would be that book. It’s not. But this, Thien’s most recent, takes place in a dystopian-ish near future that’s in our world but not of our world, at a way station on the ocean for people to leave the country they’re in so they can become refugees elsewhere. One family, a father and his teen daughter, have been stuck in this place for years. They’ve built a community for themselves, in part through this book of records that reaches back to ancient China and Baruch Spinoza, among others, yet ties directly back into the situation these lonely souls are all in. Again, highly inventive and beautifully written.