The Book of Records by Madeliene Thien

I picked this up because it was on Obama's Summer 2025 reading list and of the ten books, I had read three of them (admittedly, one of them I got out of the library by mistake and then read because I had taken it on a weekend vacation with me and felt committed rather than interested--but I read it none-the-less), I had two of them out of the library already and so while I had heard of none of the remaining five, the goal of reading them all seemed within my grasp so I put them all on my hold list. That is how I ended up with a slightly science fiction-y book that at the end of the day I am not sure waht happened. It takes place in the The Sea, which is the name given to a gargantuan migrant compound on the shoreline a decade or two in the future, and yet seemingly spanning into the past as well. Lina and her ailing father, Wui Shin, occupy an apartment where they can watch the refugee boats pull in and depart. The pair have fled the flooded Pearl River Delta in China, leaving behind Lina’s mother, brother and aunt but carrying three volumes from an epic biographical series entitled The Great Lives of Voyagers. These cover the respective histories of the German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, the Chinese poet Du Fu and the Portuguese-Jewish scholar Baruch Spinoza. They provide both a link to the past and a sextant to navigate by. The world exists in endless flux, Lina is told, and yet here in the Sea nothing ever goes missing. Its chambers fill and empty like locks on a canal. Different portions of the compound appear to correspond with different decades. As near as I can tell it is a novel of ideas--those from the past and how to apply them to the future--but like I said, I am not sure I followed this and so may be completely wrong about that!