The Book of Records

One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of the Summer A Literary Hub, Esquire, and Washington Post Most Anticipated Book of 2025 One of Time's and People's Best Books of May A Los Angeles Times and A. V. Club Top 10 Book to Read in May "A beautiful fable about migration, memory, and the struggle to recognize our common humanity." —Barack Obama A novel that leaps across centuries past and future, as if different eras were separated by only a door. Lina and her father arrive at an enclave called The Sea, a staging post between migrations, with only a few possessions. In this mysterious and shape-shifting place, a building made of time, pasts and futures collide. Lina befriends her neighbors: 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. Memory, political revolution, generational change, and the ethical imagination are at the heart of Lina’s illuminating conversations with her fellows in the Sea: how we come to believe what we believe, and how every person is an irreplaceable, unique vessel of history. Through the guidance of these great thinkers, Lina equips herself to reckon with difficult questions of guilt, responsibility, and the possibility of redemption when her ailing father begins to reveal his role in their family’s tragic past. As Lina confronts her father’s troubling admissions, she begins to reconceptualize the world around her, gaining a deeper understanding of how our individual futures are shaped by our political circumstances, and she relies on the collective joy of art and intellectual endeavors to carry her through difficulty. A novel that voyages between centuries, generations, and ideas, The Book of Records is an indelible testament to the migratory nature of humanity and our ceaseless search for a home—in the physical world, in cyberspace, in history, and in the imagination—in the wake of catastrophe.
===
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 • One of Barack Obama’s Favorite 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.