To Say Nothing of the Dog: Or How We Found the Bishop's Bird Stump at Last by Connie Willis

Ned Henry is badly in need of a rest.  He's been shuttling between the 21st century and the 1940s searching for a Victorian atrocity called the bishop's bird stump.  It's part of a project to restore the famed Coventry Cathedral, destroyed in a Nazi air raid over a hundred years earlier. 

But then Verity Kindle, a fellow time traveler, inadvertently brings back something from the past.  Now Ned must jump back to the Victorian era to help Verity put things right--not only to save the project but to prevent altering history itself.  -- Goodreads

I love this book!  Seriously, I first listened to it about 10 years ago and then listened to it again a couple of years later.  When I saw it on Audible, I was ecstatic because my local library did not have it on CD.  But would it still be as good?  The answer is yes.  It starts out a little slow because I was impatient for Ned to get the Victoria era, but man the whole thing is good. I haven't read Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome, a book which is referenced a lot and from which this book gets its title, but I will one of these days.  To Say Nothing of the Dog is written in a high manner house comedy style, much like a Wodehouse and has the same sensibilities as those book but with a large slice of science fiction thrown in.  Basically the whole book is about surviving the Victorians with their awful taste in furniture and the belief in seances, all while trying to save the space-time continuum.  But it never gets confusing or really all the science-y.  And the technology is a little laughable since they can travel through time but don't have cell phones.  But that has more to do with being written in 1997 when such things were not widely available and the internet wasn't what it is now.  Still I can forgive all that because the plot is so wonderful as are all the characters.  I was a little sad when it was over and I couldn't live in this world anymore.

Steven Crossley is the narrator and the voice of Ned.  He has the perfect British voice for this book and I love hearing his narration and the voices he does for the various characters.  He gets the tone and the inflection just right every time.

20 hours, 58 minutes

Whisper in My Ear