This is one of the best books I’ve read this year — immediately engaging, hard to put down, wrestling with big ideas in a compelling way. And it’s a book with heart, too: one that absolutely does not guarantee a happy ending, but does leave the reader (this reader, anyway) with a full heart.

What drew me in, of course, is that it’s a time-travel story. The first-person narrator, whose name we never learn (a device I usually hate, but it works here, trust me) is a young woman working in the UK civil service, who gets recruited into a top-secret program working with time-travellers who have been brought from various points in the past, to the present day. The narrator, whose mother was a refugee from Cambodia and whose father is English, finds points she can relate to in the experience of these refugees of history – a sense of not quite belonging in the world, of other people’s expectations not fully aligning with her self-perception.

The handful of people brought through the “time door” that the Ministry of Time appears to have either created or discovered, are all taken from crisis points in history just before their recorded deaths. The narrator is assigned as handler to Graham Gore, a member of the doomed Franklin polar expedition of the mid-1800s. From a handful of facts about the historical Gore and a single daguerrotype picture, Bradley has created a gentle, humorous, unperturbable man so real he practically walks off the page. His mix of bewilderment and curiosity about the modern world feels absolutely right, and in their odd and often funny partnership, he finds his way into the reader’s affection as surely as he does in the narrator’s.

The first two thirds of the novel are slow-paced and quiet, with the focus staying on the two main characters and the growing friendship between them — as well as some great minor characters, some of whom are also time travellers. There’s a growing mystery about what is actually going on with this time-travel program, whether someone is trying to sabotage it, what’s the real purpose behind it all — but all this remains in the background until the last third of the novel, when the pace suddenly picks up. In those last chapters the book is much more of a thriller, but it never loses its heart, its focus on the characters, and its ability to ask big, difficult questions — and at least hint at answers.

Can time travel change history? This novel’s answer to that question is one that will linger with me for a long time.

This is a novel that was described to me as “literary sci-fi,” though I’d say there’s a much stronger emphasis on the literary than on the sci-fi. The futuristic/sci-fi element is that a famous American poet is hired for a large sum of money (an astronomical sum, to a poet) by a nameless but very huge company, to write a poem in collaboration with its AI poetry-writing software. The poem will be released to great fanfare to promote the company’s work in AI, and the poet, who has personal reasons for wanting a large chunk of cash, will gladly take the money.

This is one book where I regretted my usual decision to read it as an e-book, because in the printed book, there is apparently a textual way to distinguish between the contributions of the human writer and the AI in the poem they work on together, as well as in their online conversations, but this was not distinguished in any way in the text of the e-book, which made it hard to follow.

The poet, Marian Ffarmer, is loosely based on Marianne Moore; some of Ffarmer’s line in the book are actually from Moore’s poems, and the poetry AI program that Sean Michael’s used to create the lines the AI writes in the novel, was trained largely on Moore’s work, so it’s not surprising that it produced a passable pastiche of her writing style. For a writer and avid reader, I’m pretty bad at evaluating whether a particular piece of poetry is “good” or not — I know what moves me, what lines linger with me, but wouldn’t feel confident to say “this is a great poem,” and so was not sure how I was supposed to be reacting to the AI-written poetry in this novel. Is the AI (who is given the name “Charlotte” in the novel) actually any good? The implication is, not very, but I’m not sure I would have reached that conclusion on my own.

I found the human story of the book much more interesting — Ffarmer as a character, the way her life unfolds in backstory, particularly her struggle between being a wife/mother and being a poet, and the choices she eventually makes. The comparison to Moore is interesting here because although the fictional Ffarmer’s poetry echoes Moore’s, her biography, in most ways, does not. Also relevant, perhaps, is the fact that Marianne Moore lived from 1887-1971; assuming Do You Remember Being Born? is set in the present or very near future, Ffarmer, who is 75 when the story takes place, must have been born around 1950, which places her in a very different generation — in literary and in sociological terms. Could there even be a “famous poet” in the style of Marianne Moore, in the last quarter of the 20th century and the first quarter of the 21st? She could dress (as Ffarmer does) in the same striking tricorne hat and exhibit some of the same eccentricities, but she would be living and writing in a very different world, with different choices to make.

As for Ffarmer’s “collaboration” with Charlotte the AI, it led to some interesting questions about literature, language, humanity and the creative process — but one thing I missed was any sort of questioning about the ethics of a writer essentially training artificial intelligence to mimic human creativity. Not that that question is absent from the story — in many ways, it underpins the whole story, though Michaels himself is clearly comfortable with this kind of of experimentation, since he used it to write the book — but it was surprising to me that Ffarmer herself doesn’t spend much time wrestling with this, focusing rather on the logistics of how a human and a machine mind work together, and whether the result can be said to be truly an act of creation.