The Book of Records

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. 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.

"Intricate and dazzlingly expansive... This is a novel with as much to offer the heart as the mind... 'Pack a book that can withstand a thousand readings,' Arendt's husband advises when they're to be interned by the French authorities. The Book of Records is one such volume" — Observer

"Thien plunges the reader into thrilling, perilous leaps back and forth across time.... A marvel of research and imagination... Thien's dazzling historical somersault doubles as a plea for humanity" — FT

"Thien strikes worthy comparisons to Italo Calvino, Walter Benjamin, Gaston Bachelard and Ali Smith's seasonal quartet. This staggering novel blurs the line between fact and fiction to underscore the importance of storytelling itself, as a practice of endurance, and resistance" — New York Times

"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