A friend recommended this new sci-fi novel from an author I'd never heard of. Its a breezy, entertaining, forgettable, and not really science fiction even. In fact, it's more of a romance novel with some light time travel grafted onto it. While the writer is perfectly competent at making the pages turn (no mean feat), there didn't seem to be much intellectual substance to the novel beyond some vague implications that the British Empire might not have been wholly a good and glorious thing.
The plot centers around the way that 'expats' can fall in love with another one simply because they feel out of place in their new society. The narrator is a really quite helpless and annoying first generation British woman whose mother is a Cambodian refugee. She falls in love with a mid-19th-century British explorer who was plucked from arctic starvation by the titular Ministry's new time machine. The past, it seems, is a foreign country. But a sexy one!
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