In this paper, a novel Active Voltage Quality Regulator (AVQR) topology with a thyristor rectifier and an adaptive dclink voltage control strategy are proposed. The proposed AVQR can efficiently mitigate the long duration variations (e.g.undervoltages/overvoltages), voltage imbalances and voltage harmonics. Compared with conventional AVQRs, it can regulate the load voltage very well with a much lower dc-link voltage. This is accomplished by replacing the diode rectifier with a thyristor rectifier. Moreover, its dc-link voltage can vary with the deviations of the supply voltage through the proposed adaptive dc-link voltage control strategy. All of these contribute to its significantly higher efficiency for online operating, which is very important and attractive for many applications. The proposed topology and control strategy are theoretically analyzed in detail. Simulation results are also provided in the paper. Finally, the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method are verified by means of experimental results from a 2kVA prototype. Both of the simulation and experimental results show that the proposed AVQR can achieve a much higher efficiency and similar regulation performance when compared with the conventional ones.