Madeleine Thien presents "The Book of Records"

If you would prefer to buy your ticket by phone, you may call Wellesley Books at 781-431-1160.

About ticketing:

• Admission to the event is $5.
• To purchase the book with your admission, choose Admission + Book and we will waive your admission fee.
• If you decide to purchase the book at the event, we will discount your book purchase by $5.

Please note that you must purchase your copy of the book from Wellesley Books in order to have the author sign it at the event.

Please also note that we cannot issue ticket refunds within 48 hours of the event.

ABOUT THE BOOK

A Literary Hub, Esquire, and Washington Post Most Anticipated Book of 2025

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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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. (Photo credit: Andrew Querner).

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