The Book of Records

INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Named a Most Anticipated Release by Toronto Star • Literary Hub • Esquire • The Washington Post • 49th Shelf • She Does the City • An “incandescent” (The New York Times), “evocative and buoyant ” (Toronto Star) page turner from the beloved author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing—this “rich and beautiful” (The Guardian) father–daughter saga leaps across centuries past and future, as if different eras were separated by only a door • “Reading Thien is to admire how she brush-strokes language to create beauty. . . . full of unexpected moments of beauty and pleasure.” (Los Angeles Times)

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.

Exquisitely written with extraordinary subtlety of thought, The Book of Records leaps across centuries as if eras were separated by only a door. This is Madeleine Thien at her most exciting, sublime and engaging.