Description

Why did people, who lived so briefly in this universe, contain so much time?

Lina and her ailing father have taken refuge at an enclave called the Sea, a staging post between migrations, with only a few possessions, among them three volumes from The Great Lives of Voyagers encyclopaedia series.

In this mysterious and shape-shifting building, pasts and futures collide. Lina befriends her unusual neighbours: 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, and through their stories, she comes to understand the role of fate in history and the way that ideas can shape the world, and to face up to the cost wrought on her family and others by her father’s betrayals.

Profound, adventurous, and with extraordinary subtlety of thought, The Book of Records explores our search for home and the place of faith and humanity in our world. A work of huge originality and heft, it shows the great novelist Madeleine Thien at her most ambitious and enriching.

Publisher Review

A refreshing, surprising, wise, and thought-provoking novel about history, fate, and human interactions. Madeleine Thien has an expansive and searching mind and is a perfect companion for a voyage that takes us both inward and outward to a place that our minds have not been to -- Yiyun Li Rich, ambitious and utterly engrossing, The Book of Records is at once a Borgesian meditation on Time's overlapping folds, and a complex, moving feat of human storytelling. Madeleine Thien is an extraordinary novelist -- Claire Messud An immersive, mind-bending experience that intertwines characters and perspectives seldom connected, to create unexpected, resonant bonds. Thien's genius and mastery of her craft is on full display here -- Weike Wang, author of Chemistry A tale of exile and loss, of reinvention and longing. But most of all, it is a gifted writer's uncompromising vision of a world where the imagination has the profound ability to transform the rules of existence, and provide new mercies to those most vulnerable. Transportative, gripping, and tender, The Book of Records has come to us at a moment when we need it most. How lucky we are -- Maaza Mengiste I am enthralled by this book and amazed. It is capacious. Something so small should not be able to hold so much. And it is beautiful-an elegy of death and remembrance, of forgetting and of life -- James Gleick Generous, breathtaking... This book is a refuge... a place in time in which the fortunate, brave reader is invited to remember how much love and truth and mystery there is in this world -- Moriel Rothman-Zecher A symphony of time, memory, and human resilience, which reminds us of the enduring power of compassion and understanding; compelling us to reflect on our shared histories and the silent sacrifices made by those who dared to dream beyond their circumstances -- Xinran, author of The Book of Secrets Deeply serious and delightfully playful, The Book of Records is a kaleidoscopic work, nourishing of both mind and soul, which travels seamlessly and skilfully through time and space with hallucinatory clarity -- James Scudamore Both poetic and lucid, The Book of Records is exquisitely rich and ambitious, weaving a shapeshifting labyrinth of memories and loss... A much-needed book in times like these, it reminds us of the enduring light of humanity' -- Yan Ge