Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog is a wildly inventive, fast-paced, and delightfully chaotic time-travel comedy that cleverly subverts Victorian romance tropes. Set in a 21st-century Oxford where historians routinely jump backward through the centuries to study the past, the story follows Ned Henry, an exhausted researcher suffering from acute "time-lag" who is dispatched on a seemingly impossible mission to Victorian England. His task: to locate a misplaced 19th-century artifact known as the bishop's bird stump, a seemingly trivial object whose absence threatens to fatally alter the timeline. Alongside a spirited fellow historian, Ned careens through a whirlwind of pompous aristocrats, eccentric relatives, romantic mix-ups, and stray cats and dogs across multiple historical eras. Witty, charming, and intricately plotted, this Hugo Award-winning masterpiece is an absolute joy for lovers of historical mischief and clever sci-fi satire.