What To Read

Tertulia's First Dibs Editors Salon series is an exclusive look at a few of the most exciting books coming out each season. Join us for the Spring edition of this virtual salon on March 26 at 7:00pm ET for what promises to be a great conversation about books by the editors who helped to shape and publish them.

➳ March 26 at 7:00 pm ET on Zoom Purchase tickets to the First Dibs Editors Salon Note: Are you an active Tertulia member? If so, you'll get free tickets AND have the opportunity to request an advance copy of one of the featured books. Make sure to use this special promo code in your email to RSVP or contact us at help@tertulia.com to register.

One of our selections for this salon is The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien, author of the Booker Prize finalist book, Do Not Say We Have Nothing. Her latest novel moves across centuries, oceans, and ideas, to engage with the meaning and history of migration and the search for home.

We are honored to have the book's acquiring editor, Jill Bialosky (Executive Editor and Vice President, W. W. Norton & Company) join us at the salon on March 26 to talk about the book. Jill, also an author and poet, is releasing her own family memoir, a lyrical portrait of her mother's life, on May 6.

I was the proud editor of Maddie’s 2016 Giller Prize Governor General’s award and finalist for the Booker Prize, Do Not Say That We Have Nothing. In 2021 Maddie was a Fellow at the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library. She invited me to a luncheon where she was presenting the project she was working on and researching—a novel spanning past and future. The novel, she said would be about a young seven-year-old girl, Lina and her father who were at a place called The Sea, a staging post between migrations. They would have only few possessions with them. Among these were three books from a series called the Great Lives of Voyagers, one about Hannah Arendt, a Jewish philosopher in the 1930’s feeling Nazi Persecution, another about Spinoza, a Jewish scholar in Seventeenth-century Amsterdam and the last a book about Du Fu, a poet of Tang Dynasty China. She mentioned that these characters would come alive in the book in some form or another and they would act as guideposts for Lina.

I walked away from this talk mesmerized and knew immediately that Maddie was on to something brilliant, and completely original and that it would be a high-wire act, and if she pulled it off, it would be magnificent. And I wasn’t wrong. She finished the novel in 2024. In reading the manuscript for the first time, I realized that she had indeed built a world where the past and the future could live together. A novel that feels both real and surreal, that is both tender and shattering, and a novel that I know will last through the days of time.

— Jill Bialosky (Executive Editor and Vice President, W. W. Norton & Company). Jill's memoir, The End is the Beginning, comes out on May 6. The book was called a "gift to anyone with a family" by author Amy Bloom. "Be a lamp or a lifeboat or a ladder, Rumi says. This compassionate, lyrical and clear-eyed memoir is all three."