The Book of Records

De: Madeleine Thien

Narrado por: Richard Lam, Athena Karkanis, Scott Turner Schofield, Jeff Yung, Madeleine Thien

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, 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.

©2025 Madeleine Thien (P)2025 Madeleine Thien

Reseñas de la Crítica

A refreshing, surprising, wise, and thought-provoking novel about history, fate, and human interactions. Madeleine Thien has an expansive and searching mind and is a perfect companion for a voyage that takes us both inward and outward to a place that our minds have not been to (Yiyun Li)

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)

An immersive, mind-bending experience that intertwines characters and perspectives seldom connected, to create unexpected, resonant bonds. Thien's genius and mastery of her craft is on full display here (Weike Wang)

A tale of exile and loss, of reinvention and longing. But most of all, it is a gifted writer's uncompromising vision of a world where the imagination has the profound ability to transform the rules of existence, and provide new mercies to those most vulnerable. Transportative, gripping, and tender, The Book of Records has come to us at a moment when we need it most. How lucky we are (Maaza Mengiste)

I am enthralled by this book and amazed. It is capacious. Something so small should not be able to hold so much. And it is beautiful-an elegy of death and remembrance, of forgetting and of life (James Gleick)