The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien review – a dazzling fable of migration

The sea takes many forms in fiction. It was an adventure playground in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island and a rowdy neighbour in Daphne du Maurier's Jamaica Inn. It played the wine-dark seducer in Homer's Odyssey and the snot-green tormentor in Joyce's Ulysses. But while its colour can change and its humour may vary, its fictional properties remain reassuringly stable. The sea is our unconscious, a repository of memory, the beginning and end of all things. It's what Jules Verne described as the "Living Infinite". In Madeleine Thien's rapturous fourth novel, The Book of Records, "the Sea" is the name…