After several prodding interviews, our unnamed narrator is hired to a secretive job within the Ministry — she's to be a "bridge", a 24-hour assistant and monitor for a person who has been yanked out of the past and is now trying to assimilate into the 21st Century. Her "expat" is British naval officer Graham Gore, who was snatched from a doomed Arctic exploration in 1847. However, as they spend time together and the civil servant files her reports, it becomes apparent that something or someone is trying to undermine the whole time travel experiment.
This was a much more serious book than I'd anticipated, full of musing about the impacts of people from different eras merging lives and ways of thinking. It's also the least time-travelly book about time travel I've ever read — no hopping around in time or random popping up in odd spaces. However, that's not to say that it's bad... I actually really enjoyed this book, and would recommend it to people who are looking for a more literary and thought-provoking science fiction title.
I think the coolest thing about this book, however, is found in the author's note at the end: Graham is based on a real person who actually died in the expedition discussed in the book. I appreciated Bradley's dedication to research and bringing this fairly minor historical figure back to life in a big way.
