Book of Records
Regular price
€25.99
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.
Madeleine Thien's novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Women's Prize, and won the Governor General's Award, among other honours. She is also the author of the story collection Simple Recipes (2001) and the novels Certainty (2006) and Dogs at the Perimeter (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 twenty-five languages. She lives in Montreal, Canada.