The Book of Records

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

Lina and her father have arrived at an enclave called the Sea, a staging-post between migrations, with only a few possessions, among them three volumes from The Great Voyagers encyclopedia series.

In this mysterious and shape-shifting building made of time, pasts and futures collide. Lina befriends her neighbours: Bento, a Jewish scholar in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, excommunicated for his radical thought; Blucher, a philosopher in 1930s Germany fleeing Nazi persecution; and Jupiter, a poet of Tang Dynasty China, whose brilliance goes unrecognised by the state. Their stories fuse with those of philosophers from previous centuries: Baruch Spinoza, Hannah Arendt and the Chinese poet Du Fu. And as Lina’s ailing father becomes less well, he recounts how he and Lina came to reside in the Sea, and what his betrayals cost their family and others.

Exploring the role of fate in history, the migratory nature of humanity and the place of faith in our world, The Book of Records addresses fundamental questions about creativity, and good and evil. A deeply philosophical work of huge originality and heft, it shows a master storyteller writing at the height of her powers.

Author Biography

MADELEINE THIEN’s novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award. She is also the author of the story collection Simple Recipes (2001) and the novels Certainty (2006) and Dogs at the Perimeter (Granta, 2012), which was shortlisted for Berlin’s 2014 International Literature Award and won the Frankfurt Book Fair’s 2015 LiBeraturpreis. Her books and stories have been translated into 23 languages. The daughter of Malaysian-Chinese immigrants to Canada, she lives in Montreal.