Join us for a very special evening with award-winning author Madeleine Thien as she visits Winnipeg to discuss her new novel, The Book of Records (Knopf Canada). Featuring a conversation hosted by Jenny Heijun Wills, followed by a book signing. Co-presented by McNally Robinson Booksellers.
This event will be hosted live in the Atrium of McNally Robinson Booksellers, Grant Park and also available as a YouTube stream.
In “The Sea,” a sprawling, mysterious building-complex that endlessly receives migrants from everywhere and seems to exist somewhere outside of normal space and time, adolescent Lina cares for her ailing father. Having landed at The Sea with only what could be carried by hand, Lina grows up with nothing but a trio of books to read—three volumes in a series about the lives of famous “voyagers” of the past. Soon, however, she discovers three eccentric neighbours in the building who have stories of their own to share.
As she grows up in the building, Lina spends many hours listening to the fascinating tales of these friends. But it is only when she is finally told her father’s account of how the two of them came to reside in The Sea that she truly understands the unbearable cost of betrayal in her own life. And the combined force of these stories soon sets her on her own path into the unknown future.
Madeleine Thien is the author of the story collection Simple Recipes (2001) and three previous novels: Certainty (2006), Dogs at the Perimeter (2011), Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016). Do Not Say We Have Nothing was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Folio Prize, and won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, among other honours. Her books have been translated into twenty-five languages, and her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books and elsewhere. As a librettist, she created Chinatown, a full-length opera by Alice Ping Yee Ho and Paul Yee, and collaborates on a range of chamber works. In 2024, she received the Writers’ Trust Engel Findley Award, honouring a writer in mid-career. Born in Vancouver, Madeleine lives in Montreal and teaches part-time at Brooklyn College at The City University of New York.
Host Jenny Heijun Wills is professor of English at the University of Winnipeg where she teaches creative writing and critical race studies. She is the author of two books of creative nonfiction, Everything and Nothing At All, a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Weston non-fiction prize in 2024 and Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related, which won the award in 2019.
Venue
McNally Robinson - Grant Park
- 1120 Grant Avenue