‘The Book of Records is an immersive, mind-bending experience that intertwines characters and perspectives seldom connected, to create unexpected, resonant bonds. It is written with a lightness of prose that belies the emotional and philosophical weight of the material. It is a remarkable blend of storytelling and scholarship. Thien's genius and mastery of her craft is on full display here’ Weike Wang

‘Light radiates from every stunning sentence in this beautiful new novel by Madeleine Thien. The characters, each of them grappling with some of the most profound questions of our time - are illumined by Thien's humane and capacious intelligence. The Book of Records is 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 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

‘The Book of Records is 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

‘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

‘I loved Madeleine Thien's The Book of Records; it broke my heart, and held me together. I have found myself thinking often about Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin, as they come to life - and my god, how deeply and stunningly they come to life in this book - and have found great solace in Thien's generous, breathtaking retelling of their stories, and in the novel's reminder that it is only our words, and our small actions, over which we have some modicum of control, so we have to try to wield them for gentleness and decency. The fortunate, brave reader is invited to remember how much love and truth and mystery there is in this world, too’ Moriel Rothman-Zecher

‘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

‘A symphony of time, memory, and human resilience, which reminds us of the enduring power of compassion and understanding; compelling us to reflect on our shared histories and the silent sacrifices made by those who dared to dream beyond their circumstances’ Xinran