{"id":105857,"date":"2025-08-29T17:11:11","date_gmt":"2025-08-29T17:11:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/105857\/"},"modified":"2025-08-29T17:11:11","modified_gmt":"2025-08-29T17:11:11","slug":"canadian-author-madeleine-thien-makes-barack-obamas-2025-summer-reading-list","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/105857\/","title":{"rendered":"Canadian author Madeleine Thien makes Barack Obama’s 2025 summer reading list"},"content":{"rendered":"

Canadian author Madeleine Thien is on former\u00a0U.S. president Barack Obama’s 2025\u00a0summer reading list for her novel\u00a0\u00a0The Book of Records<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Toward\u00a0the end of each\u00a0summer, Obama releases a list of his favourite recent reads. These\u00a0include\u00a0fiction and nonfiction books by\u00a0both international and U.S. authors.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Thien is the only Canadian writer to make this year’s 10-book list.<\/p>\n

The Book of Records<\/a>\u00a0is set 100 years in the future and follows Lina,\u00a0a 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Obama called it “a\u00a0beautiful fable about migration, memory, and the struggle to recognize our common humanity.”<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Thien\u00a0was in the grocery story, picking out a can of chickpeas, when she learned she had been chosen for Obama’s list, she wrote\u00a0in an Instagram post<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

She writes that she was full of wonder that her\u00a0“admittedly strange and personal and perhaps demanding” novel,\u00a0The Book of Records<\/a>,\u00a0made the list.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Thien is\u00a0a short story writer and novelist. She is the author of\u00a0novel\u00a0Do Not Say We Have Nothing<\/a>, which\u00a0won the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award in 2016 and was shortlisted\u00a0for the Man Booker Prize.<\/p>\n

Her debut novel,\u00a0Certainty<\/a>, published in 2006, won the Amazon First Novel Award, and was a\u00a0Globe and Mail\u00a0Best Book.\u00a0Thien is also the author of\u00a0Dogs at the Perimeter<\/a>, which was a\u00a0Globe and Mail\u00a0Best Book, and the children’s book\u00a0The Chinese Violin. Her first work of fiction,\u00a0Simple Recipes, won four awards in Canada and was a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The other books on Obama’s 2025 summer reading list are below.<\/p>\n

\"TenObama’s list of his 2025 summer reads. (Instagram.com\/barackobama)