An Evening with Madeleine Thien
Friday May 09 2025 7:00 pm, Winnipeg, Grant Park in the Atrium | Streaming on YouTube
Join us for a very special evening with award-winning author Madeleine Thien as she visits Winnipeg to discuss her new novel, The Book of Records (Knopf Canada). Featuring a conversation hosted by Jenny Heijun Wills, followed by a book signing. Co-presented by Plume Winnipeg (formerly the Winnipeg International Writers Festival).
This event will be hosted live in the Atrium of McNally Robinson Booksellers, Grant Park and also available as a YouTube stream.
In "The Sea," a sprawling, mysterious building-complex that endlessly receives migrants from everywhere and seems to exist somewhere outside of normal space and time, adolescent Lina cares for her ailing father. Having landed at The Sea with only what could be carried by hand, Lina grows up with nothing but a trio of books to read—three volumes in a series about the lives of famous "voyagers" of the past. Soon, however, she discovers three eccentric neighbours in the building who have stories of their own to share.
As she grows up in the building, Lina spends many hours listening to the fascinating tales of these friends. But it is only when she is finally told her father’s account of how the two of them came to reside in The Sea that she truly understands the unbearable cost of betrayal in her own life. And the combined force of these stories soon sets her on her own path into the unknown future.
Madeleine Thien is the author of the story collection Simple Recipes (2001) and three previous novels: Certainty (2006), Dogs at the Perimeter (2011), 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, 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.
Host Jenny Heijun Wills is professor of English at the University of Winnipeg where she teaches creative writing and critical race studies. She is the author of two books of creative nonfiction, Everything and Nothing At All, a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Weston non-fiction prize in 2024 and Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related, which won the award in 2019. 
See:
The Book of Records
- Madeleine Thien 
Hardcover
$36.95
Reader Reward Price: $33.26
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.
