The Book of Records
Author(s): Madeleine Thien
Named 2025's Most Anticipated Release by Toronto Star * Literary Hub * Esquire * The Washington Post * EsquireThe sublime, long-awaited, major new novel from the beloved author of the GG Award-winning, Booker Prize-shortlisted bestseller Do Not Say We Have Nothing.
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. These neighbours are Bento (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Baruch Spinoza), a Jewish scholar in seventeenth-century Amsterdam who was excommunicated for his radical thought; Blucher (whose life mirrors Hannah Arendt), a philosopher whose academic promise in 1930s Germany became a quest to survive Nazi persecution; and Jupiter (or shades of Du Fu), a poet of Tang Dynasty China whose brilliance went unrecognised by the state, and whose dependence on fickle patrons barely sustained him while lesser artists thrived.
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.
An adventurous, voyaging novel in which time occupies space uniquely, The Book of Records holds a mirror to the idea of fate in history, interrogates questions of legacy, explores how the political factors of a collective moment may determine an individual's future, and beautifully shows the infinite joys of art and intellectual endeavour. This is the great novelist Madeleine Thien at her most remarkable, exciting, engrossing, and enriching.
General Information
- :
- : Granta Books
- : Granta Books
- : 08 May 2025
- : books
Other Specifications
- : Madeleine Thien
- : Paperback
- : English
- : 368
- : FA
More About The Product
"Madeleine Thien's time-warping historical novel The Book of Records collapses centuries and geographies in an ambitious family saga.... In an aching, dreamlike narrative that overlaps distant centuries and geographies to chart cycles of authoritarianism and loss...This staggering novel blurs the line between factand fiction to underscore the importance of storytelling itself, as a practice of endurance, and resistance.... Try to read without weeping profusely." -- The New York Times
"Deeply humane .... In an aching, dreamlike narrative that overlaps distant centuries and geographies to chart cycles of authoritarianism and loss, Thien uncovers glimmers of community among disparate individuals .... With her imagined worlds, incandescent prose and malleable sense of time and history, Thien strikes worthy comparisons to Italo Calvino, Walter Benjamin, Gaston Bachelard and Ali Smith's seasonal quartet. This staggering novel blurs the line between fact and fiction to underscore the importance of storytelling itself, as a practice of endurance, and resistance .... Try to read without weeping profusely." -- New York Times Book Review
"[An] ambitious, elliptical novel .... A poignant meditation on loss and its many meanings, grief an endless loop like an Escher drawing .... The Book of Records is both a dystopian fantasy ... and an ode to a planet in crisis." -- The Washington Post
"Rapturous .... The Book of Records is a rich and beautiful novel. It's serious but playful; a study of limbo and stasis that nonetheless speaks of great movement and change." -- The Guardian
"Thien writes beautifully about the lives of these thinkers, and their tales of escape from political or religious oppression end up melding with Lina's own story....With The Sea, Thien literalizes a state of mind, the in-betweenness that comes before one makes a major decision. The stories Lina absorbs in that out-of-time place all ask whether to risk your family or your life on behalf of an ideal-whether it's worth sacrificing yourself for another, better world you can't yet see." -- Gal Beckerman - The Atlantic
"Thien plunges the reader into thrilling, perilous leaps back and forth across time. ... Thien's inhabiting of these different timescales is a marvel of research and imagination... Thein's dazzling historical somersault doubles as a plea for humanity." -- Catherine Taylor - Financial Times
Author Biography: Madeleine Thien is the author of four books, including Do Not Say We Have Nothing, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. She lives in Montreal.
