The Book of Records

INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Named a Most Anticipated Release by Toronto Star • Literary Hub • Esquire • The Washington Post • 49th Shelf • She Does the City • 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.

MADELEINE THIEN is the author of the story collection Simple Recipes (2001) and three previous novels: Certainty (2006), Dogs at the Perimeter (2011) and 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, the 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.

ISBN: 9781039009561
Format: Hardback
Pages: 368
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: May 06, 2025

“I could tell you that this novel is, in my opinion, Thien’s finest. I could tell you I’m in awe of her ability to construct such a rich, detailed world, so full of unforgettable characters and ideas and unexpected movements through time and lineage. And while all of that is true, what strikes me most about this novel is how engaged it is with our capacity to care for one another, our capacity for love. It’s stunning, a story to disappear into.” —Omar El Akkad, author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

[In The Book of Records, Madeleine Thien] revisits themes of coercion, betrayal, and guilt that made her Booker Prize–shortlisted Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016) so powerful. This is a more abstract work, though its highly intellectual nature is counterpointed by riveting scenes of terror and flight. . . . [A] bold attempt to reach new ground in an already distinguished literary career. . . . [E]nriching and rewarding." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Prismatic and dazzlingly unorthodox, the novel’s ambition is apparent within its first pages, as Thien seeks to drill to the very core of the human condition. . . . [E]vocative and buoyant . . . And yes, it is a page turner." —Toronto Star

"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. . . . [Thien] gracefully folds these mostly true stories into an ambitious family saga, like accordion pleats. 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." —The New York Times

"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