Kaliane Bradley’s debut novel is a clever, funny yarn that breathes fresh air into time-travel novels, postcolonial narratives and romance stories alike. One day in the near future, a Whitehall civil servant is informed by a colleague: “We have time travel,” she says, like someone describing the coffee machine.”
Then we’re off. It turns out that forced migration and dislocation are experienced not just across geography but time itself, with doomed figures from the past pulled out of wars, natural disasters and failed journeys to survive in the 21st century and adapt to feminism and music streaming. They are subjected patronisingly to the cliched language of flight, exile, refuge, homeland and belonging – with an extra, temporal dimension – as they acclimatise, some better than others. As one “expat” woman says: “I have engaged ‘Tinder’ on my ‘phone’… I have been so wise passing long. It is but a new medium.”
