To Say Nothing of the Dog

This was recommended years ago while I was working on a video game about time travel. And it's pretty much exactly what you'd want from a time travel story: just enough fake science to make things interesting, but not so much to make everything tedious. Plus it's clear the author loves the setting and time period, to say nothing of the book's namesake.

It's more Victorian comedy of errors than science fiction, although there's plenty of both. And I would say it's slightly too long, even if it hadn't taken me several years to get through it – several of the concepts and character definitions are just repeated instead of being explored in more detail, and one of the “big reveals” is blatantly telegraphed at least two chapters too early, making the characters seem a little dense. Overall, though, it does a fantastic job of feeling simultaneously contemporary and old-fashioned, and both unsentimental and heart-warming.