The Book of Records
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE QUEBEC WRITERS’ FEDERATION AWARDS PARAGRAPHE HUGH MACLENNAN PRIZE FOR FICTION • LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR FICTION • SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2026 CLIMATE FICTION PRIZE • One of Barack Obama’s Favourite Books of the Summer • TIME’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 • Named a Best Book of 2025 by The Globe and Mail • The New Yorker • Vulture • New York Public Library • The Guardian • Esquire • The Boston Globe
An “incandescent” (The New York Times), “evocative and buoyant” (Toronto Star) page turner from the beloved author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing—this “rich and beautiful” (The Guardian) father–daughter saga leaps across centuries past and future, as if different eras were separated by only a door • “Reading Thien is to admire how she brush-strokes language to create beauty. . . . Full of unexpected moments of beauty and pleasure.” (Los Angeles Times)
Why did people, who lived so briefly in this universe, contain so much time?
Lina and her ailing father have taken refuge at an enclave called the Sea, a staging post between migrations, with only a few possessions, among them three volumes from The Great Lives of Voyagers encyclopaedia series.
In this mysterious and shape-shifting building, pasts and futures collide. Lina befriends her unusual neighbours: Bento, a Jewish scholar in seventeenth-century Amsterdam; Blucher, a philosopher in 1930s Germany fleeing Nazi persecution; and Jupiter, a poet of Tang Dynasty China, and through their stories, she comes to understand the role of fate in history and the way that ideas can shape the world, and to face up to the cost wrought on her family and others by her father's betrayals.
Exquisitely written with extraordinary subtlety of thought, The Book of Records leaps across centuries as if eras were separated by only a door. This is Madeleine Thien at her most exciting, sublime and engaging.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Thien (Do Not Say We Have Nothing) delivers a stimulating if diffuse novel about migration and storytelling. It takes place in a magical realm called The Sea, where time and space seem to have collapsed. Lina, 7, and her father arrive here as refugees from their home city of Foshan in what was once China, and encounter fellow displaced people from around the world. As they wait for the rest of their family to join them, Lina and her father reread the three books they fled with—children's biographies of poet Du Fu, philosopher Baruch Spinoza, and historian Hannah Arendt. At 10, Lina meets their neighbors Jupiter, Bento, and Blucher, who know an uncanny amount about Du, Spinoza, and Arendt, and hail from those three thinkers' respective times and places. Thien alternates Lina's story with lengthy biographical passages devoted to the three historical figures. In the present, Lina, her father, and their new friends pass their days discussing history and philosophy, sharing stories, and searching for meaning ("What we call now has no solidity," claims the Arendt-like Blucher, prompting Lina's father to respond, "Maybe imagination is a way to find that place"). Thien hints intriguingly at deeper themes of grief and interconnection, but they're left underdeveloped. There's much here to admire, but it doesn't quite hang together.
