Madeleine Thien is the author of the story collection Simple Recipes and four novels: Certainty, Dogs at the Perimeter, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, and now The Book of Records. Do Not Say We Have Nothing was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and the Folio Prize, and won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, among other honours. Her books have been translated into 25 languages, and her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books and elsewhere. As a librettist, she created Chinatown, a full-length opera by Alice Ping Yee Ho and Paul Yee, and collaborates on a range of chamber works. In 2024, she received the Writers’ Trust Engel Findley Award, honouring a writer in mid-career. Thien lives in Montreal and teaches part-time at Brooklyn College at The City University of New York.
“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 (Chaos: Making a New Science and Time Travel: A History)
Named a 2025 Most Anticipated Release by Toronto Star • Literary Hub • Esquire • The Washington Post • 49th Shelf • She Does the City
The Book of Records opens inside “The Sea,” a mysterious shape-shifting enclave, a staging-post for waves of migrants coming and going, a building made of time where pasts and futures collide. Here, a girl named Lina cares for her ailing father.
Having arrived carrying her few possessions by hand, Lina grows up with only three books to read—a trio taken from a grand 90-volume series about the lives of famous “voyagers” throughout history. As she goes about daily life in the building, finding food and necessities for herself and her father, she befriends three eccentric neighbours, each with a story to share. There’s Bento, an ex-communicated Jewish scholar from 17th-century Amsterdam (who resembles voyager Baruch Spinoza in one of Lina’s books); Blucher, a philosopher from 1930s Germany who escaped Nazi persecution (and whose life mirrors that of Hannah Arendt, from another of Lina’s books); and Jupiter, a brilliant but impoverished poet of Tang Dynasty China (whose story shadows that of voyager Du Fu). As Lina grows up, she spends hours with these three, listening to their fascinating tales. But it is only when her father, his strength fading, reveals how he and Lina came to seek refuge in The Sea that she begins to understand her own story, and the acts of love and betrayal shaping her life.
Exquisitely written with extraordinary subtlety of thought, The Book of Records leaps across centuries as if eras were separated by only a door. It holds a mirror to the role of fate, shows how a political moment may determine the course of an individual’s life, and suggests the longings and consolations of a voyaging mind and heart. This is Madeleine Thien at her most exciting, sublime and engaging.
Do Not Say We Have Nothing is a breathtaking novel that tells the story of three musicians in China before, during and after the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. With the ease and skill of a master storyteller, Thien takes us inside an extended family in China, showing us the lives of two successive generations–those who lived through Mao’s Cultural Revolution in the mid-twentieth century; and the children of the survivors, who became the students protesting in Tiananmen Square in 1989, in one of the most important political moments of the past century.
Starring Antonio Michael Downing, Ben Ladouceur, Neil Smith & Madeleine Thien. Co-Hosted by Kris Demeanor & Deborah Willis
In the spirit of reconciliation, we acknowledge that we live, work and play on the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy (Siksika, Kainai, Piikani), the Tsuut’ina, the Iyarhe Nakoda Nations, the Otipemisiwak Métis Government of the Métis Nation within Alberta District 6, and all people who make their homes in the Treaty 7 region of Southern Alberta.
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