Canadian author Madeleine Thien makes Barack Obama's 2025 summer reading list
Posted on: Aug 29, 2025 21:11 IST | Posted by: Cbc
canadian river author Madeleine Thien is on former U.S. Chair Barack Obama's 2025 summertime reading material lean for her novel The Book of Records.
Toward the end of each summer, Obama releases a list of his favourite recent reads. These include fiction and nonfiction books by both international and U.S. Authors.
Thien is the only Canadian writer to make this year's 10-book list.
The Book of Records is set 100 years in the future and follows Lina, a young girl from China, and her ailing father as they seek refuge in a place called "the Sea," where time has collapsed. In this world, voyagers and philosophers from centuries past coexist with migrants from around the globe.
Lina grows up with only three books, each chronicling the lives of famous voyagers throughout history. Over time, these figures come to life as her eccentric neighbours, eventually becoming her friends.
Obama called it "a beautiful fable about migration, memory, and the struggle to recognize our common humanity."
Thien was in the grocery story, picking out a can of chickpeas, when she learned she had been chosen for Obama's list, she wrote in an Instagram post.
She writes that she was full of wonder that her "admittedly strange and personal and perhaps demanding" novel, The Book of Records, made the list.
Thien is a short story writer and novelist. She is the author of novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing, which won the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General's Award in 2016 and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
Her debut novel, Certainty, published in 2006, won the Amazon First Novel Award, and was a Globe and Mail Best Book. Thien is also the author of Dogs at the Perimeter, which was a Globe and Mail Best Book, and the children's book The Chinese Violin. Her first work of fiction, Simple Recipes, won four awards in Canada and was a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.
The other books on Obama's 2025 summer reading list are below.
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