A novel that leaps across centuries past and future, as if
different eras were separated by only a door.
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.
Thien, Madeleine. (2025). The Book of Records. New York: WW Norton & Co.
