Book of the Week April 30, 2026
What if the ultra-wealthy could vacation in the past? In this imaginative premise, time travel is real and commercialized, with Tempus Tours, helmed by the enigmatic Inigo Frank, catering to elite thrill-seekers who are willing to pay a premium for front-row seats to history. Frank invites documentary filmmaker Phoebe Hunt to shadow him for a week, capturing both the behind-the-scenes operation and a group of tourists embarking on a harrowing excursion to London during the 1941 Blitz. The trip goes catastrophically wrong. Most of the party returns badly injured and in need of emergency care, but one traveler, Sasha, doesn’t come back at all. Phoebe’s documentary takes a sharp turn as she finds herself embedded in a desperate rescue mission, filming Frank and his team as they race to pull Sasha from the past. But the deeper Phoebe digs, the stranger things become. Details feel off—one party member was married to someone else entirely, Phoebe’s certain, and she has the unsettling sense that the missing woman is someone from Phoebe’s own past, tied to a mistake she’d rather forget. Lloyd’s gripping, thought-provoking narrative goes far beyond a clever sci-fi concept, using time travel as a lens to examine identity, consequence, and the hidden forces that shape who we become.—Jeff Ayers
