Booker Prize–shortlisted author Madeleine Thien discusses her latest work, a “Time” Must-Read Book of the Year.

What if the boundaries of time and space could be crossed as easily as the threshold of a door frame?

Pasts and futures collide in Madeleine Thien’s “brilliant outlaw novel” (Los Angeles Times), The Book of Records. Longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, The Book of Records follows protagonist Lina and her father after their arrival at an enclave called The Sea.

In this mysterious and shape-shifting place, a building made of time, 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.

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.