Awards

• Long-listed for Climate Fiction Prize 2026
• Long-listed for National Book Critics Circle Award 2025
• Short-listed for Climate Fiction Prize 2026

Overview

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.

Full Product Details

9781324078654

Table of Contents

Reviews

""Madeleine Thien has an expansive and searching mind and is a perfect companion for a voyage that takes us both inward and outward to a place that our minds have not been to."" -- Yiyun Li, author of Wednesday’s Child ""The Book of Records is an immersive, mind-bending experience. . . . Thien’s genius and mastery of her craft is on full display here."" -- Weike Wang, author of Rental House ""I am enthralled by this book. . . . Something so small should not be able to hold so much."" -- James Gleick, author of Chaos: Making a New Science and Time Travel: A History ""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 ""Light radiates from every stunning sentence in this beautiful new novel by Madeleine Thien. . . . Transporting, gripping, and tender, The Book of Records has come to us at a moment when we need it most."" -- Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King, finalist for the Booker Prize ""I loved… The Book of Records for how it broke my heart, and for how it held me together."" -- Moriel Rothman-Zecher, author of Before All the World ""A symphony of time, memory, and human resilience… compelling us to reflect on our shared histories and the silent sacrifices made by those who dared to dream beyond their circumstances."" -- 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. 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

Author Information

Madeleine Thien is the author of five books, including The Book of Records, named one of Obama’s Best Books of 2025 and 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.

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