A novel that leaps across centuries past and future, as if different eras were separated by only a door.
Lina and her father have arrived 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. Under the tutelage of these great thinkers, Lina equips herself to face her ailing father’s troubling admissions about his role in their family’s tragic past. Lina’s encounters with her intellectual and personal forebearers force her to reckon with difficult questions of guilt, responsibility, and the possibility of redemption.
Profound, exquisitely written and with extraordinary subtlety of thought, The Book of Records explores the role of fate in history, the migratory nature of humanity, our search for home, and the place of faith and humanity in our world.
Genres
Fiction
Historical Fiction
Fantasy
Science Fiction
Literary Fiction
Magical Realism
368 pages, Hardcover
First published May 20, 2025
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/218569917-the-book-of-records
About the author Madeleine Thien
Madeleine Thien was born in Vancouver. She is the author of the story collection Simple Recipes (2001), and three novels, Certainty (2006); Dogs at the Perimeter (2011), shortlisted for Berlin’s International Literature Prize and winner of the Frankfurt Book Fair’s 2015 Liberaturpreis; and Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016), about musicians studying Western classical music at the Shanghai Conservatory in the 1960s, and about the legacy of the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations. Her books and stories are published in Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and Australia, and have been translated into 25 languages.
Do Not Say We Have Nothing won the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize, the 2016 Governor-General’s Literary Award for Fiction, and an Edward Stanford Prize; and was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, the 2017 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, and The Folio Prize 2017. The novel was named a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2016 and longlisted for a Carnegie Medal.
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