Now it's hard to describe the plot of a time travel story without tripping over spoilers, so I’ll keep this brief. Maybe one of the best ways I can sum up this book is try and imagine what would happen if P.G. Wodehouse had been commissioned to write Twelve Monkeys. You’d need to swap out a couple of things, though. That sense of doom isn’t quite there. This is a book focused on making you laugh more than questioning your own sense of fate and mortality. There’s also no virus, although a pandemic is mentioned. Instead, our time travelling historians here are being sent back in time to try and track down artefacts in order to rebuild the old, bombed out Coventry cathedral. There’s also less of that intricate Gilliam clutter. Willis’ time travellers are, like I said, historians. They’re working out of universities, selling their services to keep themselves funded, causing them to be hounded by persistent benefactors such as the dreaded Mrs Schrapnell as they cope with a constant lack of capable staff.
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