Kingston WritersFest 2025 opens with two of the year’s most startlingly original works of fiction, novels that explore the highly charged themes of exile and displacement with inventiveness and profound insight.

In The Book of Records, internationally acclaimed novelist Madeleine Thien conjures life inside “The Sea,” a sprawling compound that houses transiting migrants, including 11-year-old Lina and her ailing father. Their fellow-travellers spin stories of real-life historical figures – Hannah Arendt, Baruch Spinoza, and the Tang-dynasty poet Du Fu, all survivors of oppression – which become intertwined with Lina’s days and years. The discovery of what separated Lina and her father from the rest of their family turns the notion of political oppression on its head. This is a book about books and the ideas they contain, the lives of their authors and the lessons they teach. In the end, though, as one of Lina’s companions tells her, “A person is not what they know. A person is what they yearn for.”

Canisia Lubrin’s Code Noir has been hailed as a work of immense literary and political force. Its structure is based on the infamous, real-life “Code Noir,” a set of 17th century decrees that governed chattel slavery in the French colonial empire. The original Code had fifty-nine articles; Code Noir has fifty-nine linked stories that range across generations, continents, and narrative styles. In awarding this work the 2025 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, the jury described it as “a virtuoso collection that breaks new ground in short fiction… Code Noir contains multitudes.”

Thien and Lubrin join Eric Friesen for a wide-ranging conversation about the weight of history on those who live with its consequences and the sources of resistance and consolation they inevitably discover.

This event is sponsored by Chez Piggy & Pan Chancho Bakery.