“It is late and, in these hours, the Book of Records always takes on a new form. The train continues, a sound that blurs into the tide of water against the shore.”
“The boy turned the page of his book. ‘I’m counting the hours until we get to the ocean. My mother and aunt sent me ahead but I wish I could turn around and go back. There’s something important I forgot to tell them.”
Current installment of Tommi Reads the World – we are now in the C’s!!!
Country: Canada
Title: The Book of Records
Author: Madeleine Thien
Language: English
Translator: n/a
Publisher: W.W. Norton 2025
In my attempt to “get a jump” on the Booker Prize longlist (which will be announced Tuesday), I’ve made predictions and read several of my own and other predictions. Of those, I am almost 99.9% sure Madeleine Thien’s The Book of Records (W.W. Norton 2025) will be listed. I’m also pretty convinced, without even seeing the list, that it will win. When I talk about books oozing with Booker type, this novel is what I mean. Was it my favorite of those I’ve read recently? Absolutely not. Do I think it deserves a reread, at a slower pace? Yeah, I do. The art of storytelling, the formation of this novel, the building pieces that make it what it is, that is where this novel soars. It’s smart, but it makes you work for it.
While reading the novel, I found myself staring at my copy of A Wrinkle in Time, a book I devoured as a 6th grader from a quartet I devoured a few years back. The two Madeleines seem to have a bit in common; in many respects, I’d say this is the beloved childhood classic for adults.
The nuts and bolts of the novel are a young girl and her father arrive at a port that is purgatory – a place where the water that crashes into the land is a different body of water depending on who you ask. They, along with others, wait to take their leave. While there, the father is forced to reckon with his own past – a past Lina must face as well.
But the novel is much more than Lina and her father. The Book of Records bleeds memories and choices into the future, a story about storytelling and memory and the human condition. How we cling to the past, how we retell the events of our lives and the lives that came before, how these lives never cease but stay afloat in a limbo land on the sea or on a train, how we can weave in and out of the storylines, retelling, re-remembering them, making them ours.
Read this book.
A Girl Named Tommi 