The more I think about Madeleine Thien’s The Book of Records, the more in awe I am at what she manages to accomplish in its pages. While it’s very much a novel of ideas, her premise and characters are so intriguing that I found myself wandering about it whenever I wasn’t physically reading it. Thank you so much @allenandunwin for my early copy!

In fact it’s now madly underlined, full of scribbles and notes and thoughts. And while I know this may not appeal to everyone, my favourite kind of reading experience is one that activates my brain, gives me things to chew over and make sense of. What I’m trying to say is that Thien asks her reader to participate – to make connections both within the story itself, with its circular themes and metaphors, but also with the what the book is saying about the world we live in right now.

The result was incredibly rewarding, and it’s worth taking slow. Its part historical, part speculative, part coming-of-age and yet Thien manages these disparate parts so fluidly.

But let me tell you something of the plot. Lina is a young girl who, with her father, has had to leave her homeland. They end up in a place called The Sea, which seems to symbolise displacement, a place for refugees, somewhere temporary. But they stay much longer than anticipated because her father is sick, and can’t move on.

She becomes obsessed with the only books she has, three volumes of The Great Voyagers encyclopaedia, about the lives of three real-life philosophers - Hannah Arendt, a German Jew who escaped the Nazi regime, Baruch Spinoza, a 17th-century writer who was expelled from his religious community in Amsterdam, and Du Fu, a Chinese poet who suffered in poverty his whole life for speaking out against the political regime of the day.

Lina’s neighbours at The Sea are uncanny doppelgangers for these philosophers. They claim the books don’t tell the whole story and set out to teach her, and us, the truth about their own experiences - oppressive regimes, the cost of speaking the truth, exile. Sound familiar?

But who are these neighbours really? Are they in Lina’s mind, her books come to life? Or are they real refugees in her present?

Either way, through them Lina learns what it is to suffer and come through the other side. Is resistance worth it? Is resilience? What does it actually mean, to put our values above our lives?

But more importantly, Thien asks her readers to look back at history in order to understand where we are RIGHT now, in this moment, and what every individual can still do about it. She asks us to find our moral compass, to value every human life.

It’s an ambitious, beautiful, intelligent, utterly heartfelt plea to look after one another, as we humans are at a crossroads once again. I loved it.

I loved Madeleine Thien’s The Book of Records (thank you @grantabooks via @netgalley for the review copy). It’s a beautifully expansive novel that leaps across time and space, exploring human migration and big philosophical ideas of fate, faith and humanity. At its core is the story of Lina, a young girl, and her father who have had to leave their home in the south of China with a few meagre possessions for reasons that are only slowly revealed as the narrative unfolds. Ending up in a shifting, temporary place called the Sea where time collapses and extends - a place most people pass through to get to safer more stable homes, the pair end up staying longer than intended due to the father’s ailing health. Armed with three slim books from a larger series of great voyagers through time, Lina reads and re-reads the lives of Du Fu - a poet of Tang Dynasty China, Baruch Spinoza - a Jewish scholar in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, and Hannah Arendt - a philosopher in 1930s Germany fleeing Nazi persecution. Whether a coincidence or Lina’s brilliant imagination, three neighbours - Jupiter, Bento and Blucher - who resemble these figures in the Sea are able to fill in the details, passing down the information that is missing in the voyager series. This is where time shifts, where past and present bleed into each other and whether the facts are true or not - in the Afterword, Thien mentions that The Book of Records ‘dwells in the moments when biographical certainties surrounding Du Fu, Spinoza and Arendt are non-existent, scarce or blurry’ there is a timelessness to the novel which she succeeds in creating. It’s really hard to describe Thien’s novel, it’s so rich in detail and ideas that will take time to unpack. Definitely a book that will stand up to a re-read (or multiple reads). As I said, I really loved it and now really want to go back and revisit the only previous book of Thien’s I’ve read (Do Not Say We Have Nothing) which I don’t think I appreciated at the time. Thien writes subtly and deftly that there is danger in missing her brilliance, which I think younger me was guilty of doing. I would love to know if anyone has read any of her other books and if there are any you would recommend!

A place where people from different age meet, a reflection on time and what could mean losing stories
Great read
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

This is a beautifully written story that meditates on history, identity, migration and personal responsibility. I enjoyed being taken to different worlds via Lina's experiences and conversations, and growing up/maturing with her as I read on.

How do you review a book that is so many things? Interwoven strands of story from various points in history, converging to make a philosophical tapestry that is both tragic and hopeful... A tale of exile, with no fixed point of reference yet brimming with a sense of home. A story of loss, acceptance, and finding completion in those absences. It is, indeed, a record of our hope.

Thank you for this ARC in exchange for an honest opinion.

The concept of this book was super interesting and I enjoyed the blend of different time periods and perspectives.
However, the world-building was hard to understand and I struggled finishing it (it took me almost a month).
I definitely liked the first part more than the rest because the story became increasingly fragmented. I had so many questions...Still, I continued reading because of the biographical bits, especially the ones about Hannah Arendt, which were my favourites.

I absolutely love this and have already recommended it as a book group read. Beautiful writing, wonderful characters - just brilliant!

In The Book of Records (May 2025), Madeleine Thien returns with a genre-defying novel that blends historical and speculative fiction while exploring the contemporary themes of politics, migration and refugee crisis.

The story is set in a mysterious enclave known only as The Sea. It's likened to a refugee camp, a transient home to countless migrants, standing as a stark metaphor for statelessness, memory loss, and the fractured identities of those displaced by global upheaval.

At the centre is Lina, who arrives at The Sea as a young girl with her ill father. With only a few salvaged belongings, including a photo of a once-whole family and 3 volumes from a 90-book series titled The Great Lives of Voyagers, Lina finds herself growing up in this spectral world where time folds in on itself and the boundaries between past and present blur.

Lina encounters 3 enigmatic neighbours whose lives and philosophies profoundly alter her own. There’s Jupiter, a poet echoing the brilliance of Tang Dynasty's Du Fu; Bento, reminiscent of Baruch Spinoza, the excommunicated 17th-century philosopher; and Blucher, a figure haunted by the legacy of 20th century political theorist Hannah Arendt. Through these characters, Thien explores vast personal and philosophical questions on life. As Lina listens to the stories of her neighbours, she becomes aware of her own story and the betrayals that brought her to The Sea.

In this book, Thien captures the interior life of displacement with precision, and her scenes are haunting and compelling. There are no dramatic epiphanies here, only quiet reckonings that stretch fluidly across time. I found myself pausing often to savour the lyrical prose and quietly powerful ideas. It's clearly an epic in itself, a worthwhile wait of nearly a decade since her last novel. I think it's a likely contending nominee for book prizes.

I thank #NetGalley and Granta for the review opportunity. By the way, I love the cover design!

Madeleine Thien’s previous novel “Do Not Think We Have Nothing” achieved the rare (one of I think 24 books to achieve) it double of being shortlisted for both the Booker Prize (2016 – where I ranked it 2/13 on the longlist) and the Women’s Prize (2017) as well as winning Canada’s biggest prize – the Giller Prize.

At its heart it featured a story within a story, one secretly reproduced and added to across the generations – the so called Book of Records – and she has used that to give this book the title (although I don’t think referring to the same book).

The opening of the book – and to a large part its framing device throughout - reminded me of Susanna Clark’s “Piranesi” perhaps crossed with Moshin Hamad’s “Exit West”.

The book is narrated by Lina, some fifty years after she (then a seven year old) and her father (“a systems engineer managing the structures of cyberspace. He had worked for the government and, later, against it”) flee their home City of Foshan as political exiles/migrants, leaving behind Lina’s mother, her “Aunt” Oh (who took her father in as a child and supported him through his education) and her three year older brother Wei.

They end up in the Sea – a mysterious meeting point of migrants; for many just a staging post them to continue on their voyages – although with some residents like Lina and her father staying much longer; an enclave of torus like corridors and Escher style staircases; and a place where space and time seem to meet, meld, loop and warp.

Lina and her father have with them three volumes of a collection of ninety books – The Great Lives of Voyagers – whose tales obsessed Lina and her brother: the three volumes being about Du Fu the 8th Century Chinese poet ; Baruch Spinoza the 17th century Dutch born Portuguese-Jewish descended pre-Enlightenment philosopher; Hannah Arendt the German born Jewish political theorist.

In their second year, a hidden (or just revealed) doorway takes Lina into an atrium where she meets three people – an old Chinese man Jupiter, a 40 year old man Bento, and a sixty something woman Blucher and when the three encounter the three volumes, they begin to tell the stories of the three “adventurers” as they seem to remember or forget them.

From there the bulk of the rest of the novel – is effectively lightly fictionalised/imagined-but-true-to-widely-received-facts biographies of the three characters.

It is in many ways an odd criticism to make of a book which moves across decades and countries so freely, but in many ways I felt the book rather circumscribed itself with its concentration on the three historical lives, as the detail given was greater than my interest in each character – just as Lina was effectively frustrated her father was only able to take three volumes of the ninety in “The Great Lives of Voyagers” I wished the author had added more volumes to her own tale. And, like one of my criticisms of her previous novel, I did at time feel like I was reading a Wiki treatiese, although to be fair to the author the biographies in many ways fill in the less documented part of each character’s lives (Du Gu’s drifting after his examination failures and his increasing belief he has been overlooked both as a poet and for imperial career advancement, Spinoza’s time in exile, Arendt’s escape across France into Spain and Portugal). This I think is the author’s intention as declared in the Acknowledgments – where she says that the book (and particularly the three biographies) within it “dwells in the moments when biographical certainties surrounding Du Fu, Spoinoza and Arendts are non-existent, scarce or blurred. In this way I wished to explore no only individual lives – but the times themselves, timelessness and namelessness”. – and I do also think the book as at its strongest in the way it captures those times, times when people are fleeing in the face of overwhelming national catastrophes – the An Lushan rebellion, the plague outbreak in Amsterdam, Spain still reeling from the Civil War and now dealing with the refugees fleeing the World War.

I found Spinoza’s story the hardest to follow and enjoy. Perhaps necessarily given his rather limited geographical movements much of his section consists of his philosophy (and I am not particularly interested in that topic which does I have to say curtail enjoyment here a little like my lack of interest in Bach’s music did with her previous novel). Arendt’s seemed the most conventional – and other than her relationship with Benji (Walter Benjamin) and fidelity to her biographical record, could I felt have been a more general story of a refugee fleeing Nazi-ism. Du Fu’s was the most intriguing and imaginative I felt.

But I would have preferred more details on The Sea and when for Part 2 of the Novel “The Ethics” (easily the shortest of its three parts) the story switches to her father’s story and we understand the earlier comment about his involvement “for the government and later against it” and the book moves into a sci-fi type world of the control of cyber-systems and cyber-territory I found this a welcome break from the biographical detail and also a clever thematic link back to the world of The Sea. As a result it was a little disappointing that Part III, after some initial extracts from Lina’s journeys away from the Sea, reverted to the three biographies.

Overall, this is a highly thought provoking and intelligently written novel – but one I perhaps, at least on a first read, admired more than I enjoyed. Some of this I think relates to the lack of other reviews and author interviews and I look forward to revisiting the book again after publication (and would not be surprised if that revisit is part of a major prize listing).

Completely savoured this amazing book. Many thanks to NetGalley and Granta for allowing me to read this book. I will pop back over the next two days to add more links to where I have shared socially.

Lina and her father have fled from Foshan in the Guangdong province of China. They find themselves at 'the Sea' an enclave, and stopping point for those migrating or fleeing from one place to another. They have few possessions, but the most important are a set of three books from 'The Great Voyagers' encyclopedia series.

There are lots of questions in this book, why did they flee Foshan, how did they arrive here, and why are her mother, brother and aunt not with them. Lina watches the ferries arrive and depart, observing the tensions of those fleeing and those arriving, as they struggle to stay united with their loved ones.

The Sea is a strange place, Thein's descriptions of it reads like a labyrinth, a myriad of passages, roofs, levels, and rooms which in my imagination are stacked on the coast. Perhaps a crumbled version of a once thriving seaside town. The Italian coast springs to mind (Vernazza, Cinque Terre).
friends her neighbours, Blucher, Jupiter and Bento, along with Brother Orange a cat that has a fondness for Bento. These neighbours are also the characters from her treasured 'Great Explorers' encyclopedia books. Blucher, a female Jewish philosopher who ends up fleeing Nazi persecution across the south of France. Jupiter, the renowned poet Du Fu from the Tang Dynasty China and Bento (Baruch Spinoza), a philosopher of the 17th century, who dared to question the church, the bible and the existence of a God.

Their stories are woven into hers. This is a complex thatch of history woven of threads that span centuries. And while I write this at a point near half way, I wonder whether the embodiment of these great voyagers of history are the imagination of a girl, lost and displaced, fearful of losing her ailing father, to create comfort; to create hope... Jupiter says: 'You and he are both dreaming. I who say you are a dream am also a dream. The question of who is the dreamer is as trivial as the passage from day to night'.

I am not yet sure, but I can understand why some will turn away from this book, as it glides from the 12th floor overlooking the sea back in time to the stories of these amazing Voyagers, but I found it so incredibly beautiful and enlightening.

There is much to be learned in a book, and they say fiction is often based in fact, and this book with its historical tales is so engaging. I have found myself researching into each of these characters, and reserving books about each of these historical legends which I knew nothing of, from the library. I wonder if though I will be disappointed with them, as I cannot imagine they will transport me so beautifully into their worlds as Madeleine Thein does with her gorgeous and vivid writing.

Ultimately Lina's father's story unravels and the book comes harmoniously together

"One Way or another" Bento said to my father, "your child inherits your life, so let her inherit a true thing not a false thing".

How beautiful, and how true. How many untruths pass from parents to children, for protection, for honour, or maybe more simply expressed, 'to preserve from shame'. I wonder if this is actually a quote of Baruch Spinoza, a philosopher of the 17th century, and one of the key characters in this complex and interwoven tale.

Anyway I thoroughly enjoyed this story. I understand why others may find it complex weaving the three voyagers stories together with Lina's but I loved it. Any of the stories could stand on its own, and I especially loved Hannah's journey through the south of France. I held onto every word and moment as I hoped for her to successfully flee the Germans.

Thein's writing is magical and I look forward to buying my own version of this book when it is released in the next few days. There are stunning quotes throughout.

I really wanted to like this book but sadly it just didn't happen for me. Maybe I read it at the wrong time and would have appreciated it more some other time. I found the story of Hannah Arendt most accessible and next, Spinoza's story. I couldn't really connect with the Chinese poet Du Fu's parts, perhaps because I had not heard of him before. I found his narration a little too similar to the main narrative of Lina and her father.

This is undoubtedly a profound novel and one that probably deserves more attention than I felt able to give it. It simply didn't resonate with me for some reason. Perhaps I'll reread it one day in a better frame of mind.

In “The Book of Records” Madeleine Thien delivers a brilliantly contrived fusion of speculative dystopia and fictionalised biography as the premise for a profound philosophical examination of humanity across centuries and cultures.

In the story, a young Chinese girl Lina and her father Wui Shin find themselves separated from Lina’s mother and brother Wei, and stranded in the Sea – a sort of halfway house for refugees seeking passage to some vague place of safety reachable only by boat. Fleeing their hometown of Fosham Lina could only take three random volumes of “The Great Lives of Voyagers”. The term voyagers in the context of the story seems rather ironic. The term would normally inspire a romantic notion of exotic travels and world exploration, but not here. The voyages in The Book of Records are of an entirely different nature. Baruch Spinoza is excommunicated from his Jewish community in Amsterdam for holding heretic views. Du Fu, a poet of Tang Dynasty, ineptly tries to navigate not only the treacherous corridors of the emperor’s court but also the violent waters of flooding rivers and waves of crippling famine. Hannah Arendt, a German Jew, and her communist husband Heinrich Blucher, escape Nazi Germany, then Europe to avoid certain death.

Lina and her father’s three neighbours in the Sea tell the stories of the three voyagers as if they were their own. Tales of indomitable conviction, integrity and kindness as well as incomprehensible cruelty, prejudice and suffering shape Lina’s understanding of humanity, culture, history and fate. It is the only, but the best, schooling a young girl can get in her circumstance. As time passes, she learns about her own father’s betrayal and why they are suspended, floating in this purgatory they call the Sea.

A beautifully written, sharply observed exploration of humanity’s past and its future at the place in time where they meet.

🌊 REVIEW 🌊

The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien
Release Date: 8th May

Thank you @grantabooks and @netgalley for the e-ARC

📝 - Lina and her father have arrived 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. Under the tutelage of these great thinkers, Lina equips herself to face her ailing father’s troubling admissions about his role in their family’s tragic past. Lina’s encounters with her intellectual and personal forebearers force her to reckon with difficult questions of guilt, responsibility, and the possibility of redemption.

💭 - I requested this on Netgalley as I really enjoyed Do Not Say We Have Nothing which I read a few years ago. I’ll say now, I don’t think this one quite gelled with me like that did. It is quite a hard book to read and get into, and in the end I had to resign myself to not fully understanding what was going on, especially with the jumps in time, and the different dives into topics that I have very little awareness about (philosophical ethics, systems theory etc.). Thien is no doubt a great writer, and I did really enjoy the scenes in The Sea, a dystopian kind of place which cannot be pinned down, full of people from all around the world. I haven’t rated this one as I feel kind of unable to, but one I would recommend for fans of philosophy, and tales that weave stories across time.

#thebookofrecords #madeleinethien #bookreview #bookstagram #bookstagrammer #bookrecommendations #literaryfiction #litfic #historicalfiction #speculativefiction

Many thanks to Granta Publications for providing me this review copy through NetGalley!

The Book of Records is a lyrical, philosophical, and profound exploration of the meaning of life and love through time.

Lina and her father are residents of The Sea, a strange and liminal place that is characterised by its nebulous and fluid architecture and its temporary inhabitants, who are always looking for the next boat out the second they arrive.

Their neighbours are three eccentric figures, who the reader may come to recognise as the story unfolds…Blurring the lines between reality and fiction, past, present and future, life and death, Thien’s novel is a slightly discombobulating read that is at times, beautiful, and at others, on the confused side.

I absolutely cannot criticise Thien for the beauty of her writing, the clarity, however, stopped me from totally engaging in what promised to be at least a 4 star read from the blurb. Whilst it is clear the amount of painstaking research that went into the biographies of certain characters, it often felt just that, a fictional rewriting of personal histories that didn’t necessarily contribute much to the plot or general effect.

I fear my lack of philosophical knowledge may have prevented me from fully comprehending what was at stake for Thien in the writing of this - that being said, I was happy to let it wash over me until the end :)

Madeleine Thien is masterful, erudite and enchanting, weaving so much together and leaving so much unspoken and yet so much said in the spaces in between. The Book of Records is such a scholarly book and yet has such a light touch, often leaving the reader wondering what is happening, right up until the end. The Sea: what or where is it .....it's a delight to try to work it out and yet, for so long, not to know whether one will ever be allowed to or not. This is now - and will remain - one of my very favourite books.

This novel’s intriguing premise drew me in, but it wasn’t long before I felt all at sea with the multiple stories within stories and the shape shifting dimensions of place, reality, and time itself, which weren’t always worked in seamlessly.

There are several eminently quotable thoughts within this eclectic mix of sci-fi, fantasy, fable, individual and ancestral stories, political discussion and nuanced narrative, coupled with philosophical profundity like this:

“In the long run, he read, every lie that survives into the future becomes a truth.”

The clever construct, immense research required, and sensitive, poetic writing reveals this book deserves its place in the literary fiction genre. While I’m in awe of the application and artistry, it frequently felt laborious and somewhat confusing to read.

And it struck me that it might just be too clever for its own good by putting quirkiness above comprehension. Some readers will be enthralled, of course, by the book’s convoluted, questioning nature, its variety and depth.

Others might feel as if they’re spun sideways by the dense weightiness of the text. I was disappointed to discover that I didn’t have the necessary focus and concentration to follow the stories easily myself.

The book of records? Hints suggest it could be governmental, the watchers or the watched, or even one kept by God. Sadly, I gave up before finishing it, so I didn’t find out. Perhaps you will have more luck. Thanks to the author, Granta Publications and NetGalley for the eARC.

A novel that brings together stories of displacement and uprooting across time and space, finding beauty and sadness and affinities between Du Fu, Spinoza, Arendt and the fictional characters from near-future China. Profoundly moving, poignant and horribly timely, in a time of refugee crisis, government inhumanity in US and Europe, rise of fascism. Thien's story is intricately constructed and thought-out. I wanted there to be more at the end - but that's also quite fitting.

I read this having read and (rated five stars) Do Not Say We Have Nothing. I think I expected this to be similar, especially as the idea of a "Book of Records" is explored in Do Not Say We Have Nothing, and a lot of the themes are similar, but this was a vastly different book, clearly intended for a very different audience. There was a large amount of philosophical debate between the characters that left me a bit lost, meaning I didn't really get much from the conversations or understand what the writer was trying to say. All of the characters (except maybe Hannah) had very similar voices, everyone spoke in a very similar, highly academic and intelligent way (including the young children!) which made it quite difficult to get attached to the characters or even distinguish them. That being said, I love the concept of it, the imagery of the Sea was beautiful and the idea of these strangers who Lina meets retelling the stories from her books worked really well. I feel like my disappointment in it was largely my own fault as I expected something different, and the philosophy focus is not something I am particularly interested in, but even so I could appreciate it was a really beautiful novel.

Unfortunately this one I have to DNF. I don't DNF lightly, especially for an ARC. I told myself I could DNF if I at least got through 50%, but at 47% I'm close enough to call it a day.

This book is so confusing. There are so many names, so many time periods, and so few line breaks or explanations. Every sentence seems to start with "X character did Y", in a monotonous sort of hell. One paragraph was just a very, very long list.

Maybe this book gets better and makes sense when you get further in, but given it has put me into a 2 week long reading slump and I still didn't even reach 50%, I don't think it's for me. I hope it does find its audience, as I'm sure when all the threads are pulled together it's going to have a wonderful ending. I just had no idea who anyone was or why I should even care about them, at any point.

’m initially very confused reading this book it has a slightly nightmare like quality that makes you feel you don’t really think that you’re understanding what you are reading which in turn makes you feel like you are loosing your mind
Really need a an elderly man and his daughter staying at the edge of this sea in what appears to be a staging post prior to onward migration to unknown places. This place of the worldly and magical lacking elements of reality and somehow appears to be able to receive people from different time periods. From the people passing through the sea, we hear stories of their migration and the reasons for it.
There are stories about forced migration in World War II with Germans caught in Paris at the start of war being interned in a camp in the south of France. These sections are naturalistic and easy to follow,
The novel covers issues about our feelings of nationality and how this influences how we see ourselves and the world around us for example, the Jewish family stripped of their nationality by Hitler’s Nazi government are suddenly at sea in the world
The paragraph that sums it up their feelings for me was“The world German is so much misused that one can hardly use it at all anymore. “ it described the mixed feelings of Germans who are Jews and therefore lose their Germaness and nationality
There are other stories recurring throughout the novel set in 15th century Amsterdam and China
All these people we meet in the naturalistic stories seem able to meet each other at this staging post on the edge of the sea where they find themselves telling each other stories of their lives as they wait for onward connections. I have to admit I found it hard to know which of the characters in the staging post of the sea were the ones described in the stories.
Another theme of the novel seems to be the importance of books the father and daughter travel choosing three out of a large series of books/ and Encyclopedia like about explorers. The family choose 3 to carry with them seemingly randomly and regret the ones they had to leave behind almost like their members of their family. whereas other characters in displacement camp carry books with them but
are unable to read them in their stress. The pages seem to be blank.
There is also a lot of clever philosophy and ethics stuff that occurs repeatedly throughout the novel which I’m afraid I didn’t really understand these quotations rather washed over me in my ignorance.

I think this is the kind of literary novel that may well find itself on the Booker prize long list . I can imagine other reviews or find it easier to follow than I did.

I read an early copy of the novel on NetGalley UK in return for an unbiased review. The book is published in the UK on the 8th of May 2025 by Granta publications.
This review will appear on NetGalley UK, StoryGraph, Goodreads and my book blog bionicSarahSbooks.wordpress.com. After publication will also appear on Amazon UK.