A near-future British government has time travel and no idea what to do with it, so it pulls a handful of people out of history moments before they would have died and assigns each one a “bridge” — a civil servant who lives with them for a year and helps them adjust. The narrator gets Commander Graham Gore, a real officer off Franklin’s lost Arctic expedition of 1845. Most of the book is the comedy of that: A Victorian naval officer discovering Spotify, cigarettes, and washing machines, and the bridge falling for him while filing weekly reports on him. Then the spy plot arrives. Bradley’s mother was a Cambodian refugee, and the book’s real subject is what it costs to be told to assimilate.
The Ministry of Time