Published By: Sceptre
Pages: 368
Released On: 14/05/2024
A boy meets a girl.
The past meets the future.
A finger meets a trigger.
The beginning meets the end.
England is forever. England must fall.
In the near future, a disaffected civil servant is offered a lucrative job in a mysterious new government ministry gathering ‘expats’ from across history to test the limits of time-travel.
Her role is to work as a ‘bridge’: living with, assisting and monitoring the expat known as ‘1847’ – Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to find himself alive and surrounded by outlandish concepts such as ‘washing machine’, ‘Spotify’ and ‘the collapse of the British Empire’. With an appetite for discovery and a seven-a-day cigarette habit, he soon adjusts; and during a long, sultry summer he and his bridge move from awkwardness to genuine friendship, to something more.
But as the true shape of the project that brought them together begins to emerge, Gore and the bridge are forced to confront their past choices and imagined futures. Can love triumph over the structures and histories that have shaped them? And how do you defy history when history is living in your house?
*****
Thanks to NetGalley and Sceptre for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.
I had been so excited about this book for months, and the early praise did nothing to temper that excitement.
This could have been a completely different review if I had given up on it when I planned to. Let me explain.
It took me a long time to get into it, to get my head round the actual concept, but I never expected time travel to be instantly easy to understand. And if I’m honest – and I know this is going to make me sound somewhat unintelligent – there were so many words I didn’t understand, fancy words where more everyday words would have fit. I had to have Google open next to me throughout so I could find out what they meant. This meant it was a slower read than I think the plot deserved. I’m not even sure why they were used; it reminded me of the episode of Friends when Joey writes a letter to the adoption agency but looks up every word in the thesaurus and changes it to sound more intelligent, but it just ends up jarring and makes no sense.
Our main story is between Gore and the woman known as ‘bridge’. It flits between the present time, and his time back in the 1800s. This gave me an interesting perspective on the characters, and gives us a background as to why Gore (and the others) are the way they are. There are also intermittent sections written in the form of a diary or a report, like she was speaking directly to the reader, which initially was a bit random, but it did work overall.
I could have done with shorter chapters. That’s not a negative on the book as I know lots of people like long chapters, but I don’t particularly, and so if I could reformat it, I’d shorten them slightly, make them a bit snappier.
It is a mixture of fantasy and sci-fi, romance, historical, action, adventure, a bit political – it’s got a bit of everything for every reader. It’s got little twists and turns and surprises that I wasn’t expecting which was a nice surprise.
If I’m being completely honest, I did consider DNF-ing it, which would have been a shame as I was so looking forward to it, but I just found it really difficult to get into. I normally give a book 20-25% of the way in, and then I know if I want to continue. And happily, by about 15-20% in, I was enjoying it, which is good, as I think it would have been a shame to stop earlier as it does get interesting.
It isn’t the perfect book I was hoping for. But it was, overall, enjoyable, interesting, entertaining; and I’m very glad I carried on as it is a completely different book by the end in terms of how good I found it. Would I recommend it? I think in hindsight, yes I would. I would tell people to persevere with it if they thought it was too slow, because it does pick up. It is thought-provoking and asks a lot of questions; a good choice for a book club I think.
Books By Your Bedside 