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Named a 2025 Most Anticipated Release by Toronto Star o Literary Hub o Esquire o The Washington Post o 49th Shelf o She Does the City
The sublime, long-awaited, major new novel from the beloved author of the Governor General's Literary Award-winning, Booker Prize-shortlisted bestseller Do Not Say We Have Nothing.
The Book of Records opens inside "The Sea," a mysterious shape-shifting enclave, a staging-post for waves of migrants coming and going, a building made of time where pasts and futures collide. Here, a girl named Lina cares for her ailing father.
Having arrived carrying her few possessions by hand, Lina grows up with only three books to read--a trio taken from a grand 90-volume series about the lives of famous "voyagers" throughout history. As she goes about daily life in the building, finding food and necessities for herself and her father, she befriends three eccentric neighbours, each with a story to share. There's Bento, an ex-communicated Jewish scholar from seventeenth-century Amsterdam (who resembles voyager Baruch Spinoza in one of Lina's books); Blucher, a philosopher from 1930s Germany who escaped Nazi persecution (and whose life mirrors that of Hannah Arendt, from another of Lina's books); and Jupiter, a brilliant but impoverished poet of Tang Dynasty China (whose story shadows that of voyager Du Fu). As Lina grows up, she spends hours with these three, listening to their fascinating tales. But it is only when her father, his strength fading, reveals how he and Lina came to seek refuge in The Sea that she begins to understand her own story, and the acts of love and betrayal shaping her life.
Exquisitely written with extraordinary subtlety of thought, The Book of Records leaps across centuries as if eras were separated by only a door. It holds a mirror to the role of fate, shows how a political moment may determine the course of an individual's life, and suggests the longings and consolations of a voyaging mind and heart. This is Madeleine Thien at her most exciting, sublime and engaging.
About this Author
MADELEINE THIEN is the author of the story collection Simple Recipes (2001) and three previous novels: Certainty (2006), Dogs at the Perimeter (2011) and Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016). Do Not Say We Have Nothing was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Women's Prize for Fiction and the Folio Prize, and won the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, among other honours. Her books have been translated into twenty-five languages, and her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, the Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books and elsewhere. As a librettist, she created Chinatown, a full-length opera by Alice Ping Yee Ho and Paul Yee, and collaborates on a range of chamber works. In 2024, she received the Writers' Trust Engel Findley Award, honouring a writer in mid-career. Born in Vancouver, Madeleine lives in Montreal and teaches part-time at Brooklyn College at The City University of New York.
Reviews
"[In The Book of Records, Madeleine Thien] revisits themes of coercion, betrayal, and guilt that made her Booker Prize-shortlisted Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016) so powerful. This is a more abstract work, though its highly intellectual nature is counterpointed by riveting scenes of terror and flight. . . . [A] bold attempt to reach new ground in an already distinguished literary career. . . . Challenging fiction that serious readers will find enriching and rewarding." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"I am enthralled by this book and amazed. It is capacious. Something so small should not be able to hold so much. And it is beautiful--an elegy of death and remembrance, of forgetting and of life." --James Gleick, author of Chaos: Making a New Science and Time Travel: A History
"A refreshing, surprising, wise and thought-provoking novel about history, fate and human interactions . . . [Thien] is a perfect companion for a voyage that takes us both inward and outward, to a place that our minds have not yet been to." --Yiyun Li, author of Wednesday's Child
"An immersive, mind-bending experience that intertwines characters and perspectives seldom connected, to create unexpected, resonant bonds . . . [The novel] is written with a lightness of prose that belies the emotional and philosophical weight of the material . . . Remarkable . . . Thien's genius and mastery of her craft is on full display here." --Weike Wang, author of Rental House
"Light radiates from every stunning sentence in this beautiful new novel by Madeleine Thien. The characters, each of them grappling with some of the most profound questions of our time, are illumined by Thien's humane and capacious intelligence. The Book of Records is a tale of exile and loss, of reinvention and longing. But most of all, it is a gifted writer's uncompromising vision of a world where the imagination has the ability to transform the rules of existence, and provide new mercies to those most vulnerable. Transportative, gripping, and tender, The Book of Records has come to us at a moment when we need it most. How lucky we are." --Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King
"I loved Madeleine Thien's The Book of Records; it broke my heart, and held me together. I have found myself thinking often about Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin, as they come to life--and my god, how deeply and stunningly they come to life in this book--and have found great solace in Thien's generous, breathtaking retelling of their stories, and in the novel's reminder that it is only our words, and our small actions, over which we have some modicum of control, so we have to try to wield them for gentleness and decency. The fortunate, brave reader is invited to remember how much love and truth and mystery there is in this world, too." --Moriel Rothman-Zecher, author of Before All the World
"Rich, ambitious and utterly engrossing, The Book of Records is at once a Borgesian meditation on Time's overlapping folds, and a complex, moving feat of human storytelling. Madeleine Thien is an extraordinary novelist. " --Claire Messud, author of This Strange Eventful History
"A symphony of time, memory, and human resilience . . . [Thien] reminds us that art and ideas are often born in the margins, in the spaces where survival is a daily act of courage. Her writing compels us to reflect on our shared histories and the silent sacrifices made by those who dared to dream beyond their circumstances . . . As I read, I was reminded of a Tibetan proverb: 'The wind never forgets the mountain.' Thien's work, like the wind, gathers the stories of those who might otherwise be forgotten, breathing life into them and anchoring them firmly in our collective consciousness. This is a book that challenges, comforts, and inspires--a testament to Thien's extraordinary gift for storytelling." --Xinran, author of The Book of Secrets
"Both poetic and lucid, The Book of Records is exquisitely rich and ambitious, weaving a shapeshifting labyrinth of memories and loss. Reading the book, I was in constant awe of its intellectual opulence, which illuminates the path to an unending time. A much-needed book in times like these, it reminds us of the enduring light of humanity." --Yan Ge, author of Elsewhere
"Both deeply serious and delightfully playful, The Book of Records is a kaleidoscopic work, nourishing of both mind and soul, which travels seamlessly and skillfully through time and space with hallucinatory clarity." --James Scudamore, author of English Monsters
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