May 20, 2025
We welcomed acclaimed author Madeleine Thien (Do Not Say We Have Nothing) to celebrate the release of her new novel The Book of Records. Maaza Mengiste, whose 2020 Booker Prize-shortlisted novel The Shadow King explores parallel themes of political revolution and generational change, joind Thien in conversation.
The Book of Records tells the story of a mysterious and shape-shifting enclave called “The Sea,” in which pasts and futures collide. Traveling between centuries, generations, and ideas, Thien’s latest work is a testament to the migratory nature of humanity and our ceaseless search for home—physical, historical, imaginative—in the wake of catastrophe.
Featured Book
-
.
The Book of Records
By Madeleine Thien
Published by W. W. Norton & Company
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.
Featuring
-
Madeleine Thien
Madeleine Thien
Madeleine Thien is the author of four books, including Do Not Say We Have Nothing, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, the New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. She lives in Montreal.
-
Maaza Mengiste
Maaza Mengiste
Maaza Mengiste is a novelist, essayist, and photographer. She is the author of the novel, The Shadow King, which was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, and was a 2020 LA Times Book Prize Fiction finalist. It was named best book of the year by the New York Times, NPR, Elle, Time, and more. Her debut novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, was selected by the Guardian as one of the 10 best contemporary African books and named one of the best books of 2010 by Christian Science Monitor, Boston Globe, and other publications. Her story, “Dust, Ash, Flight,” which appeared in Addis Ababa Noir, edited by Maaza, was awarded a 2021 Edgar Award for Best Short Story. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Fellowship, a Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, the Premio von Rezzori, the Premio il ponte, a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, and a Creative Capital Award. Her work can be found in the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Granta, the Guardian, the New York Times, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and BBC, among other publications.
She has taught at New York University, Princeton University, Northwestern University, and Queens College/CUNY, and Professor of English at Wesleyan University. She is at work on her third novel.
