The Book of Records

Longlisted for the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction

A Time Must-Read Book of the Year • One of The New Yorker's Best Books of the Year • One of Bookbub's Best Literary Fiction Books of 2025 • An Esquire and Boston Globe Best Book of 2025 • A Vulture Best Book of the Year So Far • A New York Public Library Best Book of 2025 • One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of the Summer • A Literary Hub and Washington Post Most Anticipated Book of 2025 • One of People's Best Books of May • A Los Angeles Times and A. V. Club Top 10 Book to Read in May

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

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.