If you could resuscitate a hunk from history, who would you choose? The secretive Whitehall ministry in Kaliane Bradley’s striking debut is working on time travel, facilitating the removal of various Brits from their own era to (roughly) ours. The candidates were all due to die anyway, so the risk of altering history is minimal. Curiously, the boffins do not pick Lord Byron, but a naval officer on the doomed Franklin expedition to the Arctic, lost in the search for the Northwest Passage.
Each time traveller is assigned a ‘bridge’ – someone to both monitor and help them adapt to 21st-century London. Lieutenant Graham Gore is paired with a young female civil servant of mixed white and Cambodian heritage. ‘I don’t say my name, even in my head,’ she announces, but as their relationship, cooped in a shared flat, develops, he dubs her ‘Little Cat’. He has to be trained not to use the word ‘negress’ of Semellia, another bridge, and unhesitatingly recalls his own brushes with the slave trade.
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