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A 2024 literary highlight in the Sunday Times, Grazia, Dazed, Sunday Express, GQ, i-D, Stylist, Bookseller and Literary Friction
'Holy smokes this novel is an absolute cut above! Exciting, surprising, intellectually provocative, weird, radical, tender and moving. I missed it when I was away from it. I will hurry to re-read it. Make room on your bookshelves for a new classic'
MAX PORTER, AUTHOR OF SHY
'An outrageously brilliant debut . . . This is already the best new book I will have read next year'
ELEANOR CATTON, AUTHOR OF BIRNAM WOOD
'Hugely enjoyable . . . Your next crush is a long dead Arctic explorer''
JOANNA QUINN, AUTHOR OF THE WHALEBONE THEATRE
'Kaliane Bradley writes with the maximalist confidence of P. G. Wodehouse, but also with the page-turning pining of Sally Rooney. It's thought-provoking and horribly clever - but it also made me laugh out loud'
ALICE WINN, AUTHOR OF IN MEMORIAM
'A fantastic debut: conceptually brilliant, really funny, genuinely moving, written in the most exquisite language and with a wonderful articulation of the knotty complexities of a mixed-race heritage'
MARK HADDON, AUTHOR OF THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME
'Sly and illusionless in its use of history, lovely in its sentences, warm - no, hotter than that - in its characterisation, devastating in its denouement. A weird, kind, clever, heartsick little time bomb of a book'
FRANCIS SPUFFORD, AUTHOR OF GOLDEN HILL
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?
