There are rare books that come along that defy categorisation and, indeed, start off whole new sub-categories. Cloud Atlas, Life of Pi, Alias Grace, Tales of the City. The Ministry of Time is another.

Time-travel books are not rare, nor are science fantasy books that merge with romance, but this is a new hybrid of time-travel / romance /spy thriller / workplace comedy / climate emergency / dystopian novel that sings with invention and authenticity, not least in a unique narrator, unnamed but oh-so-present in all her British-Cambodian individuality, and the rounded cast of temporally expatriated travellers, stolen from their sure deaths to end up in a near future Britain of unimaginable heat (like today), rolling water shortages and comical governmental bureaucratic inefficiency (also like today—I swear, if you don't laugh...)

The narrator's new role as a 'bridge' for a Commander Gore, rescued from his death by hypothermia on an historic and fateful Arctic expedition in the 1840s, thrusts their worlds alarmingly close to each other. As they slowly navigate towards an understanding of each other's professional and personal boundaries, the bridge and Gore discover:
1: a plot against the entire time-travel programme
2: no-go areas, particularly relating to the British Empire and any discussion of racism
3: a mutual attraction

How the many genres are handled so well is a joy to behold and I devoured this book in one sitting. It is a perfect hybrid and displays that same 'hybrid vigour,' standing head and shoulders above similar books that are simply time-travel, or romantasy, or workplace romcoms. The characters are so vital and alive, neither saints nor sinners, but certainly everyone is a product of their time, their culture, their relationships, and Bradley weaves everyone's story into a pulsing, unstoppable narrative with thrills, twists and revelations galore.

And the romance works.

Five whole stars.

'We have time-travel,’ she said, like someone describing the coffee machine. ‘Welcome to the Ministry.’

Set some time in the not too distant future, The Ministry of Time opens up with an intriguing concept, time travel exists and the United Kingdom's government controls it. Told all from the point-of-view of a woman who previously worked in the languages department, she applies for an internal job wanting the higher pay. When the Ministry section of the government hires her to be a “bridge”, her life changes. I thought this started off strongly with an intriguing concept, The Ministry has selected people from different timelines that from recorded history, they know die in their own timeline. Our narrator's a bridge (someone who stays with the “expat” for a year to help them transition) for a Commander Graham Gore. Graham's an actual real historical figure which I thought gave this a slight fanfiction feel, to it's scifi and speculative fiction.

Ideas have to cause problems before they cause solutions.

It's all a little murky as to why the government has decided to pick these people and what exactly they're doing, our narrator's a company woman and doesn't question too much in the beginning. After I thought was a strong scifi start, the middle stagnated in pace and we get lost in our narrator's head for awhile. There's the transition of assimilating a man who died in 1847 to a twenty-first century London, along with the narrator's attraction to him. A lot of the attraction was already built as she's read his personal letters, knows his story, and romanticized him through this knowledge and liking a daguerreotype existing picture of him. For Graham's part, since we don't have his pov, he's a not a clear readable character; it seems he could be attracted to her but it could also be him trying to play his cards right. I've seen Outlander comparisons and I would caution reading this for the romance because you'd probably be disappointed (there were a few open door scenes but those alone do not a romance make).

The middle also explored inherited trauma and warring with helping your country but not enabling their same made mistakes. Our narrator is the daughter of a Cambodian refugee and she carries some of her mother's trauma which creates some push and pull in “just following orders”. We get introduced to some of the other bridges and expats, with two of them, a WWI soldier and black plague survivor playing bigger secondary character roles. Through their experiences to the new world, we get some discussions on gay rights and feminism.

The truth is, it won’t get better if you keep making the same mistakes.

After the more sluggish middle, the latter second half picked up speed with the building spy thriller aspect and what The Ministry is actually trying to do. There are some hints sprinkled throughout that you could kind of guess where the story is going (I wasn't hundred percent correct) and we get some action and takes on climate change. When dealing with time travel, there are always going to be some holes, this had those with some of the “whys” not fully answered and the “hereness” and “thereness” not completely making sense. The romance wasn't the strongest and the thriller aspect waiting around too long to fully hit, giving some of a rushed ending feeling. The discussions and takes on racism, trauma, sexism, imperialism, and other issues had some mealy mouth, I get the narrator is working through them herself, but it left me feeling like not a lot was said when done. This was a whole bunch of elements mixed together that I'm not sure all fully got realized and created a got lost on it's way middle that really slowed the pace and dented it's impact for me.

I mean this as the highest possible compliment: The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley feels like what might happen if RF Kuang wrote a time travel spy novel. Or if Emily St. John Mandel had personal history as the child of refugee immigrants. (And yes, yes, John Le Carré).

Astonishingly self-assured and intricately wound (especially (!) from a debut author), this is the first book in a long while that’s made me want to (metaphorically - I was reading an ebook) flip over and start again, to see what clues I missed the first read through, congratulate myself on picking up on some of the more tantalizing hints, and grasp more firmly onto the timeline- always a slippery thing when people have a habit of not staying when you left them.

I want to say less because The Ministry of Time is worth exploring one’s self. The cheeky inspiration of the - it can only be described as saucy - daguerreotype and surviving letters of the real Graham Gore, a lieutenant on an ill-fated Arctic expedition is so beautifully imagined here. I laughed out loud, I clutched at my heart at Graham and the other expats (Maggie and Arthur, especially). The prose here is sparkling. I wanted to highlight on every page (and I am decidedly not an annotater.

Finally - I’ll just say the allegations of plagiarism are malicious and false. Ignore them.

Thanks to NetGalley and Avid Reader Press/Simon and Schuster Publishing for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I was a bit disappointed by this one! It's an awesome premise, but not much happens for most of the book. I liked the characters though!

The good: the last 25%. WILD and SO GOOD. The side characters!!! It was just really well done.

The bad: how long it took me to read the first 75%. I think if I had been listening to the audio I would’ve flown through this. Part of me wants to go track it down and do just that.

Basically, I loved Gore so much. I love how much research went into it, even if the parts about the expedition itself weren’t my favorite parts of the book. I loved the consequences. The moral dilemmas! It was great. The romance was great and made me squeal at one point, but was actually hard for me to understand or believe for quite a while? Again, maybe if I’d be moving faster than 2% per day, I might (almost certainly) feel different.

In conclusion: It’s an original work through and through and those who enjoy a time travel adventure will love it!! 💗

An extremely fun mix of humor, romance, spy story and time travel. I really appreciated the way that the story used the struggles of the time expats in adjusting to the 21st century as a commentary on what it's like for "refugee:" families to relocate to a country with colonialist history. I also especially enjoyed the way that time travel was used as a metaphor for the dangers of absolute power by a country and the dangers of the surveillance state.

This book is one of the rare books that moves between genres so well— from a time travel story, to a slow burn romance, a spy thriller and even a workplace comedy with dialogue that left me laughing at times, it is a book that is thought provoking in terms of the lengths we’re willing to go to reverse damage and repeating patterns all to fix things that in the end, may not need repairing at all. It is a book meant to disorient you as well as shock you, but also a book that pulled at my heartstrings and I think everyone should give it a chance.

The Ministry of Time sucked me into its vortex from the word go. Why? Just something about the inner voice of the unnamed narrator instantly piqued my curiosity. For me, both she and the situation she places herself in are competing contrasts. She’s both very structured and certain about particular things while at the same time rootless and diving into the complete unknown.

Arctic explorer Commander Graham Gore is a superb character developed gradually by Bradley with layers and nuance to embody such depth and intellect that he’s both an attractive and enthralling presence. I loved the fact that he, the subject of the scientific experiment, was conducting just as much, if not more, analysis himself.

Gore’s and the unnamed narrator’s keen intellects fuel many ongoing banter threads that, over time, build to deliver understated moments of comedic brilliance. If you love smart banter in your romantic suspense, for that alone it’s worth reading The Ministry of Time.

However, I think this will be a polarising read because there are characteristics of this novel that some will love, but they will just not work for others.

In The Ministy of Time Kaliane Bradley explores so many different themes; certainly far too many to list here, plus I do not want to spoil the reading experience. Some will say far too many themes and ideas for a single novel.

At certain points, which I’ll touch on shortly, greater heed of the ‘less is more’ adage would have enhanced the reading experience for me, but overall I admired Bradley’s wilful ambition in penning The Ministry of Time. Yes, at times the reckless abandon with which thought-provoking ideas and statements are thrown into the plot and narrative almost cause whiplash. In parts, it’s like a literary rollercoaster crashing through a water feature. It feels as though out of control and messy in places, but I enjoyed almost every minute of the ride.

The only aspect that detracted from my unbridled enjoyment was the level of millennial angst and navel-gazing regarding visual identity. While undoubtedly integral to the story and pleasingly self-critiqued within it, I would have just turned the dial down a bit.

Kaliane Bradley’ The Ministry of Time is an audaciously entertaining story and an appealingly unhinged and thought-provoking page-turner. 4.5 Stars.

Thanks for the review copy. I feel like this book is different from anything I have read. It certainly contains time travel but I feel like it is more character driven than science fiction based. I look forward to reading more books by this author in the future.

This dual timeline, time travel story inspired by the author’s interest in polar exploration is rich with secret agent/spy-novel vibes, science-fiction, romance, drama, heartbreak, suspense, and joy! Commander Gore is such a likable character! I found I had to make myself slow down and savor this book.

I liked this book, it was different from other books I have previously read. The characters were very interesting and the story was good.

This book was so unique and fun I could not get enough! It was so engaging and witty with a perfect genre mash-up. It's a time travel story without actual time travel. The focus of this book is on the corporate side of supervising the adjustment to a foreign world rather than typical time-jumping-related action and themes (although the story definitely delivers on the classical twists in this department). Apart from being simply fun, it also draws deeper parallels between the time expats and real-life migrants in UK and social commentary is precisely what earns my books an extra star. The romance was a great bonus and worked really well. I highly recommend this book

Whoa. What a fun and wild ride.

Part science fiction, part romance, part spy thriller "The Ministry of Time" has something for everyone. Is your historical fixation Victorian arctic exploration? This book has it. Interested in compelling narration about the realities of being mixed race in a racist society? This book has that too. I never thought that I would be hooked by a romance between an unnamed 21st Century narrator and a real life British naval explorer from the 1800s but here we are.

"This Ministry of Time" is so creative and executed so well. While it is humorous and cynically hilarious, I will caution people that this is not a rom com. The vibes are closer to a sci fi thriller than a romance novel. However, I was gripped from the beginning by this story and the characters. While the characters are not all always likable (by design) and I was often suspicious of them, they all were extremely compelling.

I do think that the time travel details/plotline didn't always make complete sense. However, time travel is really tricky and doesn't make complete sense by definition. I think that the book would have gotten bogged down if significant time was spent explaining the specific rules of time travel in this scenario.

4.5 stars

Thank you NetGalley and Avid Reader Press for the eARC. All opinions are my own.

📚 #BOOKREVIEW 📚
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
⭐️⭐️⭐️ / Pages: 352 / Genre: Science Fiction

The British government has found a Time Machine and uses it to bring back inconsequential people from the past, so as to not disrupt the timeline. It’s early days, so they’re just trying to see what happens to these people when they bring them to the present. They take them right before they die and bring them to the present, then pair them with a person known as a bridge to help acclimate them to the present.

The premise of this book is so interesting as are the people they bring back. The story is mostly told from a first person perspective, who is the bridge for a soldier from 1847–and you never know her name, which I didn’t realize until I started writing this review and went back to try and find it. Weird. Anyway, it’s incredibly fun watching the people from the past learn the ways of modern society and technology. There’s also a slow burn romance that’s very hot. Story, characters, writing are all mostly great, but there are bits that just drag on and on and then the action part of this story happens too suddenly in a way that’s incredibly confusing. I think this book just needed a better editor to help shape the narrative in a more cohesive way. The elements are all there but the execution left me confused and annoyed. I really wanted to love this one.

Thank you @netgalley and @avidreaderpress for my gifted copy.

I don’t know how to really put into the words what I felt about this book. I feel like the blurbs written paint it as a light hearted spy romance. It’s so much more than that. I absolutely laughed many times. The love story absolutely tugged at my heart strings. What the blurbs on Goodreads didn’t tell me is how deeply I’d love these characters. Not just Graham and , but Maggie and Arther. Especially Arthur. It’s rare that I finish a book and immediately read it again. But here I am. Reading it again.

3.75 stars

The Ministry of Time was one of my most anticipated books this year. I found it interesting, well-researched, and lovely in parts but the back half was a bit too esoteric for me.

The set-up given by the publisher is only part of the story, and while all of it is true and very enjoyable, the author definitely tries to explore bigger themes and more complicated plot in the second half of the book. Unfortunately, that’s the part that went off the rails and became too chaotic for me.

Did I not fully understand the story or just not connect with what it was? Was the author trying to do too much or did it just go over my head? I guess I’ll never know.

In some ways, this book felt like a kookier but less successful and impactful Babel set in modern day. The fish out of water time traveler experiences, relationships, and found family aspects were the highlight for me. The complicated spy thriller aspects I could have lived without. I liked it but didn’t love it.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the advanced review copy.

The Ministry of Time released May 7th, 2024.

I am never going to watch the AMC television program The Terror (I am a fraidy-cat), but if the fandom for the AMC television program The Terror were incarnate in a single person, I would kiss that little weirdo right on the face. Every time my fannish life overlaps a little bit with The Terror fandom, I experience warm and fond feelings for a group of people who are fannishly insane in much the same way as me (the kind that comes with a lengthy bibliography). And now it has given us Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time.

With textureless hetfic escaping fandom containment left and right recently and making its way into romance novels, I feel duty-bound to report on a few things that The Ministry of Time is not:

a romance novel (I would classify it as “romantic tragedy with jokes” a la Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia)
The Terror fanfic with the serial numbers filed off

While author Kaliane Bradley does thank The Terror in her acknowledgements, she elsewhere describes the first iteration of her book as “a daft story about what it would be like if your favorite polar explorer was [sic] your housemate.” In other words, The Ministry of Time is undisguised, unreconstructed polar exploration RPF (Real Person Fic), which frankly is a great idea and more people should be doing it.

The story follows an unnamed civil servant who gets a new position working with “refugees of high interest status and particular needs.” Once she accepts the job, she finds out that the refugees in question are expats not from other countries but from other centuries. They’ve been yoinked out of their own time—where they were doomed to die via things like guillotine, witch-burning, and freezing to death in the Arctic—and now require careful monitoring to determine the impact of time travel on the human body. Our protagonist is assigned as minder to Lieutenant Graham Gore, lately of the Franklin expedition, but as time goes on and the expats settle into their new world, she and Graham begin to suspect that the government has not been truthful about the goals and methods of the time travel project. There is also a certain amount of the two of them staring at each other’s mouths.

At first, Graham and the narrator are curiosities to each other. Graham has two centuries of history to catch up on, and the narrator—his “bridge,” as she’s called—has been coached to record his every movement, as well as to find “teaching moments” in which to get him up to speed on modern-day norms. Other bridges are able to—or choose to—maintain their professional distance, to think of their expats as test subjects rather than people. Our narrator doesn’t, or can’t. Graham becomes a person to her, a person with “a willow line” of eyelashes and a habit of smoking in the bath. (He also uses a combination of charm and the newly acquired phrase “quality of life” to acquire things he wants, like an endless supply of cigarettes and an air rifle for hunting pigeons in the London suburbs.)

Through him, she also grows to love his fellow expats Arthur (a traumatized World War I escapee) and Maggie (my heart, my world, my everything). The community that blossoms among the expats, especially perfect angel Maggie Kemble who has never done one single thing wrong in her entire life, provides an elegant way to shift the reader’s perspective on what the narrator owes to her job and her country’s future, and what she owes to these all-too-real human people. If the bridges don’t care for them as people, then nobody will, because the project certainly does not. At one point, another bridge, Semellia, tries to advocate for the expats to receive mental health care, and she’s shut down with a curt “Thanks for your input.”

In her 1962 novel Love and Friendship, Alison Lurie wrote, “The power of society is such that, no matter how much we despise it, our crimes are always against individuals.” The Ministry of Time cares deeply about the individuals. Though our narrator doesn’t know the aims of the time travel project, she keeps hoping that there might be a way to fix the world that she lives in, and the world that’s to come. Her near-future London suffers battering heat waves, and global warming, surely, could have been averted? Surely the small moral compromises that get made along the way, the unease she feels in conversations with her colleagues, would be worth it, then? Bradley makes the case that there can be no future separate from the people that comprise it.

If you’re writing a book that asks the reader to support a burgeoning romantic relationship between a modern-day woman and a time-traveling polar explorer, the British Empire is the inevitable elephant in the room. Available options include depicting said explorer as a uniquely enlightened snowflake who had the correct opinions all along; dedicating an ungodly amount of narrative space to leading the explorer character to embrace the appropriate liberal shibboleths; or not talking about empire at all and hoping the reader won’t worry too much about it.

As someone who would worry so much about it, I was relieved to find that Bradley ignores the third option and finds a stellar tight-rope balance between the first two. Our narrator is the daughter of a white British father and a Cambodian refugee mother, and her position as a white-passing biracial agent of the British government allows the book to take a refreshingly nuanced approach to discussions of race, power, and empire.

Graham Gore’s life and opinions are less exhaustively documented than, say, Shackleton’s, so Bradley has some leeway to make her own decisions about what kind of person he is. But she doesn’t avoid the blameworthy points of his biography, either: In real life, Gore saw action in the Aden Expedition, which suppressed Arab resistance to the British takeover of Aden. The book baldly describes this event as a “bloodbath,” and its significance in the arc of Gore’s life—whether in his own time or ours—arises repeatedly over the course of the book.

Bradley threads a difficult needle here. She gestures at the ways in which—like Graham, and frankly like the reader—the narrator contributes to deeply immoral societal structures, but she resists the impulse to glib absolution for either of them, or for the reader. Graham is guilty; the book’s narrator is guilty; we are guilty. If that sounds grim to read, I promise you that somehow it is not. It’s accomplished with wry humor and a light hand, via kicky dialogue that illustrates the growing connection between Gore and the narrator.

We assume a particular outcome from the temporal disconnect between the book’s two central characters. Graham will be forced to question his assumptions. Maybe along the way he’ll remind the narrator about some of the structural injustices we tolerate and rationalize, even. Eventually, though, Graham will arrive at the correct moral conclusions as understood by our more morally enlightened modern age. It’s not historical chauvinism if we here now really are better than all the generations of people who came before us!

That is, at least, how the narrator thinks about it. But she’s writing in first-person, which means she’s writing from the future, which means that the her who is writing knows more than the her being written about. “I exist at the beginning and end of this account simultaneously, which is a kind of time-travel,” she reminds us. The her who is writing keeps urging the reader—and we keep ignoring her, because we also think we know best—to set down our assumption of superiority. It isn’t just wrong, it’s dangerously wrong. Those who forget the past—rather, those who believe they have nothing to learn from it, only things to teach—are doomed to repeat it.

Perhaps inevitably, the book’s attention to character, relationship, and theme comes at a cost to the nuts-and-bolts of how time travel works and what everyone’s goals for it are. A friend of mine is worryingly prone to reading time travel books I’ve recommended her and then closely questioning me on the logistics, and I could hear her voice in my head as I was reading The Ministry of Time: “Remind me where they got the time machine in the first place? And why did Adela say that killing the protagonist wouldn’t matter? And can you remind me what the mole character was hoping to achieve?” On the first read, there is simply no chance I’d have been able to answer these questions. On a second read, I was prepared to make a stab at them, but did not feel that my answers would readily withstand cross-examination. Bradley is simply not as interested in the science, the spying, or the government conspiracy; and at times that disconnect really shows.

This was fine by me. So the antagonists never fully come into focus—who cares? Aren’t the real villains the friends we make along the way? Bradley’s such a master of the tiny moments between people that it’s hard to focus on the exact mechanics of the betrayal; it’s enough that the creeping trickle of unease has now crescendoed into a tsunami that leaves devastation in its wake. “This was one of my first lessons in how you make the future,” says the narrator. “Moment by moment, you seal the doors of possibility behind you.” I thank The Terror fandom once again for opening the doors of possibility to this funny, sexy, melancholy, postcolonial, completely unhinged time travel story.

Have you ever seen an old photo of some long dead but visually arresting person and fallen a little bit in love? Do I have a book for you.

Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley is a kind of Kate & Leopold story with higher stakes and a much more thoughtful approach to how outlooks around sex and race have changed across centuries. Because of this book, I cried on the bus, which speaks to not only the emotional resonance of the book but how addicting it is if I'm so desperate to continue reading that I'll open it on the bus KNOWING THE HURT IS COMING.

For hard sci-fi/time travel aficionados, I feel that I should mention the book is quite focused on the dynamics of having a roommate from the past rather than a deep, technical portrayal of how time travel might work. The book is pretty hand-wavy outside of this dynamic, but I think it worked beautifully.

Actual rating- 3.5/5 Stars

I loved the concept of this novel! Usually time travel novels have their main character go into the past for a multitude of reasons. So this was a breath of fresh air to see the characters using time travel to save those from the past from their deaths.

Kaliane's writing style is lyrical and conjures quite the array of imagery. I will say that there were moments when it was hard to tell who was talking until you were halfway through the conversation. But I was able to power through and still enjoy the story and growth of the characters.

My biggest complaint is that the story felt a bit incomplete. It starts off insanely strong with the Ministry and the bridges monitoring their expats. And even with the romance sub-plot, the story was progressing as were the characters. But once we get to the third act, so much happens, but also a lot is left unexplained. There wasn't much to a specific (and seemingly very important!) storyline other than a couple revelations that then felt like there were too many loose ends left.

Overall, I loved this book. I just desired more.

I absolutely love time travel books, movies, stories and ideas, so I was looking forward to reading this book!
The book, taking place in the not so distant future, started a bit slow, as the main character described how the characters from the past were brought into the future and assimilated by paring each with a "bridge" to live with (an employee from the Ministry) for a year, to monitor their adjustment and progress. The narrator is assigned Graham Gore, an officer from a failed arctic expedition from 1847. Through the monitoring and assessing, we get to know Gore. along with a few other travelers from different time periods as they bond over the disorientation, loneliness and culture clashes they experience. I absolutely loved the unique descriptions and writing style that was poetic but to the point. The Commander's friends Maggie and Arthur were great examples of characters who found that our current time might have been a better place for them to have been born rather than the time they originated. I do wish there had been a bit more description of their lives previously, so we could better watch their evolution and better get to know their characters, as they brought humor and warmth to the story. I also wished for a bit more from the narrator's history, including that of her family, as there is mention of her family's traumatic past, but it is more mentioned in passing rather than being descriptive or truly in depth. I also wished for a bit more description of what it was like in the future world. More depth in general, I think would have brought this book to a 5 star for me. I am so happy to hear that the BBC will be brining this to the screen, as I think this book will adapt beautifully and may even be enhanced by adding more visuals and depth to the story. This book touches on many timely topics of climate change, imperialism, power, control, LGBTQ issues, and family/love/belonging. I absolutely LOVED the twist (I didn't see it coming and wish there had been a bit more interaction after the reveal!) and absolutely loved that at the end, there was hope for a better future for humanity , even one that included love and family, for the narrator.