The Book of Records [electronic resource]

Madeleine Thien2025

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Summary

The remarkable new novel from the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing, which leaps across centuries past and future as if different eras were separated by only a door.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, a...