Madeline Thien and Jonas Hassen Khemiri in Person

Join us on Thursday, June 26 at 7 PM as Madeline Thien and Jonas Hassen Khemiri talk about their new books, The Book of Records and The Sisters, respectively.

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.

Madeleine Thien is the author of The Book of Records, one of Publishers Weekly’s Top 10 Literary Fiction titles for spring 2025. Her novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing was a finalist for the Booker Prize, the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, and the Folio Prize and won the Giller Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award. Her work, which has appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, and the New York Review of Books, among others, has been translated into 25 languages. Born in Vancouver, she currently lives in Montreal.

An addictively entertaining, internationally bestselling family saga by a National Book Award finalist.

Meet the Mikkola sisters: Ina, Evelyn, and Anastasia. Their mother is a Tunisian carpet seller, their father a mysterious Swede who left them when they were young. Ina is tall, serious, a compulsive organizer. Evelyn is dreamy, magnetic, a smooth talker. And Anastasia is moody, chaotic, a shape-shifting presence, quick to anger.

Ina meets her future husband when she’s dragged to a New Year’s rave by her sisters, only to suffer the ultimate betrayal. Evelyn drifts through life before embarking on a wild career as an actress. And Anastasia runs off to Tunisia, where she falls in love with a woman who, years later, will transform her life.

Following the sisters from afar is Jonas, the son of a Swedish mother and a Tunisian father. Over the course of three decades, his life intersects with the sisters, from a chance encounter in Tunis to the scene of a fighter jet crash in Stockholm. When Evelyn disappears on a trip to New York, Jonas manages to track her down—and helps her to break the curse that has been looming over the Mikkolas for decades. In the process, a shocking revelation changes everything about who they think they are.

Narrated in six parts, each spanning a period ranging from a year to a day to a single minute, Jonas Hassen Khemiri's The Sisters is a big, vivid family saga of the highest order—an addictively entertaining tour de force.

Jonas Hassen Khemiri is the author of six novels; seven plays; and a collection of his plays, essays, and short stories. His work has been translated into more than 30 languages and his plays have been performed by more than a hundred international companies. His next book, The Sisters, will be published in English in June 2025.

Also check out other Arts events in South Hadley, Literary Art events in South Hadley, Workshops in South Hadley.