INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE QUEBEC WRITERS’ FEDERATION AWARDS PARAGRAPHE HUGH MACLENNAN PRIZE FOR FICTION • LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR FICTION • LONGLISTED FOR THE 2026 CLIMATE FICTION PRIZE • One of Barack Obama’s Favourite Books of the Summer • TIME’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 • Named a Best Book of 2025 by The Globe and Mail • The New Yorker • Vulture • New York Public Library • The Guardian • Esquire • The Boston Globe

“A beautiful fable about migration, memory, and the struggle to recognize our common humanity.” —Barack Obama

“In an aching, dreamlike narrative that overlaps distant centuries and geographies to chart cycles of authoritarianism and loss, Thien uncovers glimmers of community among disparate individuals. . . . [Thien] gracefully folds these mostly true stories into an ambitious family saga, like accordion pleats. With her imagined worlds, incandescent prose and malleable sense of time and history, Thien strikes worthy comparisons to Italo Calvino, Walter Benjamin, Gaston Bachelard and Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet. This staggering novel blurs the line between fact and fiction to underscore the importance of storytelling itself, as a practice of endurance, and resistance.” —The New York Times

“Prismatic and dazzlingly unorthodox, the novel’s ambition is apparent within its first pages, as Thien seeks to drill to the very core of the human condition. . . . Evocative and buoyant. . . . And yes, it is a page turner.” —Toronto Star

“I could tell you that this novel is, in my opinion, Thien’s finest. I could tell you I’m in awe of her ability to construct such a rich, detailed world, so full of unforgettable characters and ideas and unexpected movements through time and lineage. And while all of that is true, what strikes me most about this novel is how engaged it is with our capacity to care for one another, our capacity for love. It’s stunning, a story to disappear into.” —Omar El Akkad, author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“The Book of Records is a rich and beautiful novel. It’s serious but playful; a study of limbo and stasis that nonetheless speaks of great movement and change.” —The Guardian

“The Book of Records defies simple summation. . . . Despite the weighty philosophical and political themes that run throughout . . . the novel is propulsive, with ideas acting like brushstrokes that form a rich and complete picture by the novel’s end.” —Winnipeg Free Press

“Intricate and dazzlingly expansive. . . . This is a novel with as much to offer the heart as the mind. . . . ‘Pack a book that can withstand a thousand readings,’ Arendt’s husband advises when they’re to be interned by the French authorities. The Book of Records is one such volume.” ―The Observer

“A marvel of research and imagination. . . . Thien’s dazzling historical somersault doubles as a plea for humanity.” —Financial Times

“Highly vivid. . . . [Thien] has to keep creating narrative momentum from scratch, and it’s a testament to her skills as a writer that she manages so often.” —The Telegraph

“The Book of Records is a reminder that human genius and the artistry of stunning prose are the antidote to AI’s codswallop. . . . Thien has written a brilliant outlaw novel.” —Los Angeles Times

“In this Mobius strip of a narrative, Thien, an acclaimed Chinese Canadian writer, probes the burdens of diaspora peoples and the fragility of knowledge a riddle wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” —Hamilton Cain, TIME’s 100 Must Read Books of 2025

“[In The Book of Records, Madeleine Thien] revisits themes of coercion, betrayal, and guilt that made her Booker Prize–shortlisted Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016) so powerful. This is a more abstract work, though its highly intellectual nature is counterpointed by riveting scenes of terror and flight. . . . [A] bold attempt to reach new ground in an already distinguished literary career. . . . Enriching and rewarding.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“A novel for the ages, The Book of Records is both timely and timeless in the way only one writer could achieve. Exploring the contemporary issues of exiles and refugees across the world, Thien never loses sight of the young, questioning girl at the heart of this story. A modern classic in the making.” —The Tyee

“A meditation on human migration and the role of fate in history, this is absolutely a must read.” —Literary Hub

“The Book of Records [is] an exquisitely interlaced time-travel novel.” —The Straits Times

Advance Praise for The Book of Records

“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. Transportive, 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