Madeleine Thien, THE BOOK OF RECORDS

Join Madeleine Thien, author of Booker Prize shortlisted novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing, in store for a discussion of her latest novel The Book of Records, which leaps across centuries past and future, as if different eras were separated by only a door. 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.

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 three novels and a collection of stories, and her work has been translated into twenty-five languages. Her most recent novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, won the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award and was a finalist for the Booker Prize. She lives in Montreal, Canada.

Host or Publisher Elliott Bay Book Company