On the HahaFiction shelf
To Say Nothing of the Dog
Oxford Time Travel · Book 2 · 1997
Audiobook available · 20 hr 59 min
Historian Ned Henry needs a rest from searching through time for an object required by a Coventry Cathedral restoration. Victorian England seems a suitable refuge, until Verity Kindle’s interference with the past gives him another assignment: help prevent history from going wrong.
From the publisher’s blurb
“an unpredictable world of mystery, love, and time travel”Read the full description at Del Rey publisher description
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What makes it funny?
Ned is too exhausted to keep his mission straight. In a séance scene, his efforts to fake a supernatural message run into competition from another trickster, leaving the solemn gathering at the mercy of rival signals and table-lifting wires.
The comedy at work
The need to protect history repeatedly collides with the need to behave properly in Victorian company. Ned must improvise his way through social occasions while privately keeping track of deception, missed instructions and consequences that reach far beyond the room.
Try this if…
Victorian social mishaps and time-travel puzzles share the page here. Readers who enjoy elaborate misunderstandings have a distracted historian and competing schemes to untangle.
Good to know
The novel shares its Oxford time-travel setting and some minor characters with Doomsday Book. Its separate Ned-and-Verity adventure can be read on its own.
More funny time travel
Sources & further reading
- Kirkus review
Review
- Audiobook edition
Book information
- Reader discussion
Reader discussion
- Original edition bibliography
Book information
- Apple Books audiobook
Book information
- Publisher edition and series
Publisher
- Publisher and excerpt
Publisher
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