Named 2025's Most Anticipated Release by Toronto Star • Literary Hub • Esquire • The Washington Post • Esquire
One of Electric Literature's '48 Books by Women of Color to Read in 2025'.
The sublime, long-awaited, major new novel from the beloved author of the GG Award-winning, Booker Prize-shortlisted bestseller Do Not Say We Have Nothing.

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.

Madeleine Thien's novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2016 and won the Scotiabank Giller Prize 2016 and the Governor General's Award 2016. She is also the author of the story collection Simple Recipes (2001) and the novels Certainty (2006) and Dogs at the Perimeter (Granta, 2012), which was shortlisted for Berlin's 2014 International Literature Award and won the Frankfurt Book Fair's 2015 LiBeraturpreis. Her books and stories have been translated into 23 languages. The daughter of Malaysian-Chinese immigrants to Canada, she lives in Montreal.

Madeleine Thien's profile page

"I am enthralled by this book and amazed. It is capacious. Something so small should not be able to hold so much. And it is beautiful—an elegy of death and remembrance, of forgetting and of life." —James Gleick, author of Chaos: Making a New Science and Time Travel: A History

"A refreshing, surprising, wise and thought-provoking novel about history, fate and human interactions . . . [Thien] is a perfect companion for a voyage that takes us both inward and outward, to a place that our minds have not yet been to." —Yiyun Li, author of Wednesday’s Child

"An immersive, mind-bending experience that intertwines characters and perspectives seldom connected, to create unexpected, resonant bonds . . . [The novel] is written with a lightness of prose that belies the emotional and philosophical weight of the material . . . Remarkable . . . Thien's genius and mastery of her craft is on full display here." —Weike Wang, author of Rental House
"Light radiates from every stunning sentence in this beautiful new novel by Madeleine Thien. The characters, each of them grappling with some of the most profound questions of our time, are illumined by Thien's humane and capacious intelligence. The Book of Records is a tale of exile and loss, of reinvention and longing. But most of all, it is a gifted writer's uncompromising vision of a world where the imagination has the ability to transform the rules of existence, and provide new mercies to those most vulnerable. Transportative, gripping, and tender, The Book of Records has come to us at a moment when we need it most. How lucky we are." —Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King

"I loved Madeleine Thien's The Book of Records; it broke my heart, and held me together. I have found myself thinking often about Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin, as they come to life—and my god, how deeply and stunningly they come to life in this book—and have found great solace in Thien's generous, breathtaking retelling of their stories, and in the novel's reminder that it is only our words, and our small actions, over which we have some modicum of control, so we have to try to wield them for gentleness and decency. The fortunate, brave reader is invited to remember how much love and truth and mystery there is in this world, too." —Moriel Rothman-Zecher, author of Before All the World
"Rich, ambitious and utterly engrossing, The Book of Records is at once a Borgesian meditation on Time's overlapping folds, and a complex, moving feat of human storytelling. Madeleine Thien is an extraordinary novelist. " —Claire Messud, author of This Strange Eventful History
"A symphony of time, memory, and human resilience . . . [Thien] reminds us that art and ideas are often born in the margins, in the spaces where survival is a daily act of courage. Her writing compels us to reflect on our shared histories and the silent sacrifices made by those who dared to dream beyond their circumstances . . . As I read, I was reminded of a Tibetan proverb: ‘The wind never forgets the mountain.’ Thien’s work, like the wind, gathers the stories of those who might otherwise be forgotten, breathing life into them and anchoring them firmly in our collective consciousness. This is a book that challenges, comforts, and inspires—a testament to Thien’s extraordinary gift for storytelling." —Xinran, author of The Book of Secrets
"Both poetic and lucid, The Book of Records is exquisitely rich and ambitious, weaving a shapeshifting labyrinth of memories and loss. Reading the book, I was in constant awe of its intellectual opulence, which illuminates the path to an unending time. A much-needed book in times like these, it reminds us of the enduring light of humanity." —Yan Ge, author of Elsewhere

"Both deeply serious and delightfully playful, The Book of Records is a kaleidoscopic work, nourishing of both mind and soul, which travels seamlessly and skillfully through time and space with hallucinatory clarity." —James Scudamore, author of English Monsters