The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien

CBC

13-02-2025

In "The Sea," a sprawling, mysterious building-complex that endlessly receives migrants from everywhere and seems to exist somewhere outside of normal space and time, adolescent Lina cares for her ailing father.
Having landed at The Sea with only what could be carried by hand, Lina grows up with nothing but a trio of books to read — three volumes in a series about the lives of famous "voyagers" of the past. Soon, however, she discovers three eccentric neighbours in the building who have stories of their own to share.
These neighbours are Bento (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Baruch Spinoza), a Jewish scholar in seventeenth-century Amsterdam who was excommunicated for his radical thought; Blucher (whose life mirrors Hannah Arendt), a philosopher whose academic promise in 1930s Germany became a quest to survive Nazi persecution; and Jupiter (or shades of Du Fu), a poet of Tang Dynasty China whose brilliance went unrecognised by the state, and whose dependence on fickle patrons barely sustained him while lesser artists thrived.
As she grows up in the building, Lina spends many hours listening to the fascinating tales of these friends. But it is only when she is finally told her father's account of how the two of them came to reside in The Sea that she truly understands the unbearable cost of betrayal in her own life. And the combined force of these stories soon sets her on her own path into the unknown future.
An adventurous, voyaging novel in which time occupies space uniquely, The Book of Records holds a mirror to the idea of fate in history, interrogates questions of legacy, explores how the political factors of a collective moment may determine an individual's future, and beautifully shows the infinite joys of art and intellectual endeavour. This is the great novelist Madeleine Thien at her most remarkable, exciting, engrossing, and enriching.
The Book of Records is available in May 2025.
Madeleine Thien is a short story writer and novelist. She is the author of novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing, which won the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General's Award in 2016 and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
Her debut novel, Certainty, published in 2006, won the Amazon First Novel Award, and was a Globe and Mail Best Book. Thien is also the author of Dogs at the Perimeter, which was a Globe and Mail Best Book, and the children's book The Chinese Violin. Her first work of fiction, Simple Recipes, won four awards in Canada and was a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.