GEORGE FALLS THROUGH TIME, a modern Canterbury Tale

GEORGE FALLS THROUGH TIME
RYAN COLLETT
William Morrow (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery 20 January 2026

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Less meets the year 1300 in this exhilarating and thoughtfully genre-defying literary novel about a man transported through time in a moment of extreme stress, whose modern anxieties are replaced by medieval brutalities

Newly laid off George’s internet bill is in his ex-boyfriend’s name. He’s got a spider-infested apartment, and two of the six dogs he’s walking in London have just escaped. It’s pure undiluted stress that sends him into a spiral, all the way to the year 1300.

When he comes to, George recognizes the same rolling hills of Greenwich Park. But the luxuries and phone service of modernity are nowhere. In their place are locals with a bizarre, slanted speech in awe of his foreign clothes, who swiftly toss him in a dungeon. Despite the barbarity of a medieval world, a servant named Simon helps George acclimate to a simpler, easier existence—until a summons from the King threatens to send his life up in flames.

George Falls Through Time is as much an inward journey as an outward one: an immersive exploration of identity and dislocation that pits present-day sensibilities against a raw and alien backdrop, a strangely perfect canvas for the absurd anxieties of our modern lives. It's a profound meditation on the nature of desire perfect for fans of Madeline Miller and The Ministry of Time.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: No one I've ever known is not in need of challenges to become their best self. Of course, like all other circumstances in this life, the challenge can be met, or lost, failed, or left with mixed results. I think the strength of this book is its calling-forth of George's inner winner.

What works less well for me is Simon, the medieval version of George's modern self-abnegating submissive self. At least in George Simon is serving a worthy master, a thing George never found in modern times. Simon doesn't have a PoV so we can't learn why he chooses to be this person to George, this being stream of consciousness, and George is quite understandably overwhelmed by the brain-bending reality he's in the reign of Edward I. George is, howsomever, a *major* whiner, which is a big part of what he works through in the story. What does Simon see in him? I never knew. To the story's credit neither does George, and he's explicitly amazed and humbled by it.

Of course with all time-travel narratives there are practical hurdles to overcome that Author Collett largely sidesteps (a good choice in my opinion) by using the stream-of-consciousness narrative technique. It takes a good third of the book for George to think about the *way* he was transported to 1300 instead of the *why* of it. The "how" really makes all the difference. If you don't know how you got somewhere how do you ever figure out how to leave?

And about George...his historical ignorance lands him at a point he knows literally not one thing about, which fact freaks him out. As does the language the locals speak. It's a clever resolution to that giant, existentially threatening fact that earns the book its half-star bump. I'm not quite fully on board with the dragon being what it was, nor with the resolution this provided. That's the missing three-quarters of the fifth star. Both of those opinions are the remaining cavils I have to this funny, often rib-ticklingly so, story of a fish so far out of water he might as well be an octopus on Everest.

George's many mistreatments in modern times, most of which seemed to me to stem from his utter inability to see what people were quite plainly after from him, snap into focus when he's chucked into a medieval dungeon. How his life changes from there is a ride through a decade of the most torturous kind of therapy (pun very much intended) in a short time, with the steadying hand of Simon to hold. Why Simon does not get a PoV is...well, I missed it, so I'll leave it at that. The publisher compares this to Less, a book I deeply disliked; it's an apt comparison. George has a little more reason to feel whinging moaning self-pity, being trapped (?) 700 years in the past at a time he knows nothing about. It's the best thing that's ever happened to him. He needs to be shook. What could shake you more than being gay, alone, ad then finding a partner and a purpose and a core after being moved through time and meeting a dragon? He's the safest time traveler ever because he's too ignorant to cause any paradoxes. He's marginal in his life and marginal in the past; it's not like anyone would much miss him, but here in 1300 he's been through horrors yet found purpose and a shot at lasting, imperfect cobbled-together(!) happiness.

What I wanted but lacked in The Ministry of Time I wanted here too, but there was enough fun sex between George and Simon that I'm more forgiving. Oh yeah...sex...eww-ick homophobes should not even consider this story. At all.

It's a journey of self-discovery in a way I didn't expect, wasn't fully on board with, yet related to and resonated with. A bit like the Franklin's Tale from the other end of the fourteenth century, it's a bit overwrought; a bit overinterested in sex for its plot; but, overall, the message of self-discovery and giving one's self permission to live with purpose, well worth reading.