I loved the concept of this book and the way everything came together. It had such an interesting mix of genres that all worked well together making an interesting multi-genre story. This would make a good book club pick!

This book had a really interesting premise that tried to do too much. I found myself not engaging with the main characters and was much more intrigued by the side characters.

I had no idea what to truly expect with this book but I was immediately intrigued by the concept. As we follow a government project to bring people from history to the modern day, its quickly visible that not everything is as it seems and its up to the government agents and a commander from the 1700s to discover who is good and who is bad.
The writing is fantastic and kept me engaged for the entire story and I love the dual timelines. That ending had me completely hooked! I couldn’t put it down! No words can describe it all!

DNF this book, felt very jumbled and all over the place, a strange mix of genres and didn’t connect with any of the characters

TLDR: Really enjoyed this unique sci-fi thriller! At times, it felt like a slower-paced slice of life but it all came together beautifully.

The Ministry of Time is described as a time travel romance, spy thriller, and workplace comedy hybrid.

The main character works for a government ministry where she has to take care of an "expat" as he assimilates. However, the "expat" is Commander Graham Gore who died in 1847 and has been brought back.

The characters were all charming and laugh-out-loud funny. Considering the short length of this book, I found them to be well developed and layered.

To start, I absolutely loved the writing style! It was written in reflective first-person by an unnamed narrator. The story came to life and was very engaging. However, it did sometimes feel like a disjointed stream of consciousness.

In terms of the plot, the first half felt more like a contemporary romance with no clear goals or stakes. However, the focus on the smaller, slower moments was still very enjoyable. The sci-fi and thriller elements came to the forefront in the second half with more action. It all wrapped up elegantly and poignantly.

Overall, I definitely recommend The Ministry of Time if you're looking for something slower and more emotional that still has interesting sci-fi/thriller themes.

Thank you to Hachette Australia Books for providing an eARC for review via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

With so much publicity, I was intrigued to delve into The Ministry of Time. When a book is described as ‘a time travel romance, spy thriller, workplace comedy’, how can one not be drawn to this eclectic mix. Well I’m here to say, for the most part, author Kaliane Bradley has pulled it off. It is refreshing, fun and so unique with all those genres including a mix of fiction and nonfiction. Quite the conquest really.

‘Why did you bring me back from the dead? Why did you come into my life like this?’ ‘We … we saved you.’

There are many things I enjoyed about this book. Firstly the twist on time travel which focuses on bringing people from the past to the present and the current cultural challenges they face. Issues such as racism, colonisation, feminism, gender equality, climate crisis are all faced with both respective fact and humour.

‘There are buildings everywhere. No horizons. Only buildings and people as far as the eye can see, and great metal towers strung with rope. Huge grey roads, covered in metallic traffic. There’s no space here. How can you breathe? Is all of England like this? The entire world?’

Secondly, I loved the relationship between the four main characters as it seemed so genuine. Three came from the past - a failed Arctic expedition, the Somme of WWI and a London plague victim - and the bonding with the ‘bridge’ (current day person) was really heartfelt. There were many funny, interesting and sad moments that they faced together.

‘Everyone was paddling in their own era-locked pool of loneliness.’

My only criticism involves the ending - it was fast, a bit of an info dump which came across as awkward and a little unclear. Perhaps Kaliane was trying to tie too many loose ends together all too quickly. The story - up to that point - had been well paced with a perfect genre blending. Now, it was unfolding in a fashion that needed to be more evenly distributed throughout or extend the overall length of the narrative. Nevertheless, this is a highly enjoyable read with definitely a little something for everyone given the masterful combination of genres.

‘Time,’ she said, ‘is a limited resource. Like all of our resources. You only get to experience your life once … And yes, you can go back and change the details, a little, but there’s a limit to how often. Every time you dig a new pathway into time, you exhaust a little more of it, and if we go back too often and mine too deeply in the same place, again and again, pulling history from the same coal seam, it will collapse. It will obliterate us, like a black hole. You have to get it right.’







This review is based on a complimentary copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own. The quoted material may have changed in the final release.

I loved the premise of this book! It has everything I want in a book; time travel, government conspiracy with a spy on spy element.

There were parts of this book which I thought were done really well. The expats were incredibly detailed and I loved reading about when they came from. The bridges also were a great concept.

I did feel like this book was trying to do too much though and some of the pieces felt a little lacking.

For the most part though, I really did enjoy this book and I might need to source myself a hard copy because the cover is beautiful!

Thank you to NetGalley, Hachette Australia and the author for the ARC in exchange for an honest review

This was an absolute romp and I flew through it. What an amazing brain must be behind this. It felt to me a bit like ‘Everything Everwhere All At Once’ in book form but with less sausage fingers and more hottie Antarctic explorer. The public service vibes were intensely accurate - so much so that I genuinely believed there might be a Ministry of Time with Bradley as its leader. The love story felt very real. My one slight criticism is that at times Bradley was very clever, maybe too clever and might have almost been having personal jokes with herself. I didn’t mind because I largely got them but it might not be for everyone.

The Ministry of Time was a great read. It captivated the imagination and had a great mix of adventure, history, comedy, mystery, romance with a sci-fi twist.
Resembling the form of a manifest, it reflected the explorer element present in the story. In that it seemed to be recording moments of time. I really, really liked the style in which it was written. There are occasions in which I don’t generally enjoy duel timelines, however I think it was well achieved in this story and I actually found myself looking forward to each change. I also adored the characters in this book, and felt the varying relationships worked well with the concept, especially when it comes to time travel. Throughout the read I couldn’t help but think of Leopold from Kate & Leopold, as well as Ichabod from the TV show Sleepy Hollow and the feel of Sliding Doors (1998). My imagination went wild! I would definitely re-read this book and enjoy more from this author.

This book sounded so good, and I really wanted to love it, but I just felt the story fell a bit flat for me. This book is a bit of a time travel thriller romance- mixed bag and I loved the concept of having a person time travel from 1845 to the future and learn all about technology. I enjoyed the authors writing style and there were moments where I was laughing and enjoying parts of the book. I saw reviews for this book that said some people DNF’ed it and others loved it after they pushed through the beginning, therefore I was determined not to DNF it. The book did not really ever pick up for me. I have seen some people who love this book though so it seems to be a very divided opinion and you may enjoy it.

An unnamed female civil servant serves as a “bridge” or guide to a man taken from an arctic expedition where he died to the future. Graham Gore must adapt to modern lifestyle along with the other time refugees. The main female lead begins to fall for Graham as things in her life become more complicated.
This story is more spy thriller with a twist of time travel than anything else despite the fact it is marketed as a romcom. There are a few good laughs in this story as we follow the refugees from the past and see them adapting to modern life.
I was disappointed in the romance aspect. I felt for a romance there was no spark, it seemed forced. I understand that the author was trying to show the difficulty of a relationship between two different people but it just didn’t work for me. The FMC almost seemed obsessed but in a negative way rather than a romantic obsession.
It’s a shame because I enjoyed the story and the plot. I just found the main character rubbed me the wrong way and there was little growth in her.
I feel like the author wanted to use the story to discuss issues of racism and politics and some passages were very long and didn’t contribute to the plot. It was very thought provoking though.
I think if you read this expecting a sci fi thriller you will enjoy it more than if you think it’s a sci fi romcom.

I voluntarily read an advanced copy of this book. Thank you to the author, publisher and netgalley. All opinions are mine.

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley is one of the weirdest mix of genres I've ever read. This was a near future dystopian fiction, a time travel spy thriller and also a smutty romance. Say what?

In it, a mysterious government department is testing out the effects of time travel by gathering up random people known as expats from various time periods and bringing them into the present day. The main character is a civil servant who is charged with being a "bridge" for one of the expats Commander Graham Gore. Gore is a polar explorer who the world believes died on the doomed Franklin expedition to the Arctic in 1845. But now he is a slightly disoriented old fashioned man living in a house with an unmarried
young woman who is helping him make sense of the modern world.

Alongside this pair are several other expats from wildly different backgrounds and their bridges. This motley crew become friends of sorts and in one case fall in love. However there are people clearly trying to undermine the project potentially from within the department itself and soon all of the expats and bridges are in danger. The unravelling of the project and some serious mind bending plot twists ensue.

Borrowing from the blurb on the back this book asks the question "What happens if you put a disaffected millennial and a Victorian polar explorer in a house together?" And honestly this demonstrates just how odd this whole book is. It was definitely a page turner mostly because you just have to find out what the next bizarre pivot is!

One of the strangest parts was the fact that Gore is a real person. What on earth possessed Kaliane Bradley to pluck this person off the pages of Wikipedia and thrust him into the modern world and have him cosplaying a romantic lead?

In any case don't go in expecting this to be highbrow literacy fiction but do go in expecting to laugh out loud at times and be impressed with the manoeuvring of genres. It is not the most well written book I've read but I liked it and I'll be keen to see how others find it.

Kaliane Bradley’s debut speculative fiction novel demonsrates both the advantages and the pitfalls of genre mashing. The Ministry of Time is part time travel tale (obviously), part bureaucratic satire, part historical exploration, part romcom and part thriller. Some of these elements work some of the time. Some of these element work against the others. And many of these elements are made up from Bradley’s own experience and interests, as a daughter of Cambodian immigrants living in London, as a person fascinated by the Franklin Arctic Expedition in the mid nineteenth century.
When the Ministry of Time opens its unnamed narrator, a translator for the British public service is being given a job in a secret part of the government. She will be a ‘bridge’ – a person who will live with one of the six people pulled out of history by a time machine that the government controls. In order to protect history, each of these people is taken from a situation in which they were certain to die. So they end up with a soldier from World War One and a woman who was left to die from plague in the mid seventeenth century. And then there is the narrator’s ‘expat – Commander Graham Gore, pulled from the Franklin expedition to the arctic from which there were no survivors.
The narrator’s job is to help her bridge integrate with modern society but also to watch and report on them. But there is something more going on, which she feels the need to get to the bottom of and which puts all of them, bridges and their charges, in danger. But also gives the opportunity to consider what it means to be a ‘refugee’ or at least a person brought out of their world and required to conform with a new one.
The centrepiece of the novel though is the relationship between the narrator, who happens to know everything there is to know about arctic exploration and her charge, the dashing but very Victorian Commander Gore. And just to bring all this home there are completely unnecessary (although interesting) interludes about the Franklin expedition mainly after Gore has left it. Built around this is an edifice of sly observations, and a mystery that while resolved not in a way that makes a lick of sense. But maybe that doesn’t matter so long as in the moment readers are enjoying themselves.
Because, in the end, as with many time travel tales as a reader you just have to go with it because none of it really makes any logical sense. Bradley attempts to lampshade this problem right up front:
Anyone who has ever watched a film with time-trave;, or read a book with time-travel, or dissociated on a delayed public transport vehicle considering the concept of time-travel, will know that the moment you start to think about the physics of it, you are in a crock of shit. How does it work? How can it work?... I’m here to tell you: Don’t worry about it
Which is good advice in this case because if you do worry about it, the whole edifice collapses in on itself riddled as it turns out to be with bootstrap paradoxes.
The Ministry of Time is a mess, a combination of so many ideas and genres that none of them are able to deliver in a satisfactory way. But it is, overall, a fun mess anchored by a knowing narrator who is honest about her shortcomings and a relationship that readers will want to cheer for. It is the type of thing that will work well on the small screen where viewers will have even less time to contemplate the plot holes. So it is not wonder that there is a TV series on the way.

This is absolute gold. It’s a hybrid of romance, adventure, time travel, speculative and historical fiction.

The novel opens with five historical figures brought to near-future Britain by the Home Office where each is supplied with a ‘bridge’. Our unnamed FMC is assigned to Naval Commander Graham Gore, who is extracted from the year 1847 just when he would have died on an Arctic expedition. Graham is a delicious hero who would fit perfectly in just about any historical romance novel. He is gorgeous, clever, stoic and hilarious with a super-dry sense of humour. He is also curious and kind and provides not only a love interest for our FMC, but also care and solace to the other expats.

The early parts of the novel are full of delightful humour and banter as Graham settles into the 21st century. Even while dismantling a toilet, extracting his own teeth, and smoking heavily, he is still utterly attractive, to seemingly everyone - especially our FMC.

As a debut novel, it’s packed with ideas and shenanigans and there’s a lot to follow. With five bridges and five expats, plus all the shady Home Office staff, there many people to keep track of, as well as the (often competing) timelines. There’s also double crossing, attempted murder, and a plot twist I didn’t see coming. Look out for Margaret from 1665. I loved it all 😍

Writer Kaliane has a cheeky turn of phrase, her metaphors are apposite, her vocabulary expansive and her sense of fun is totally on the money: Graham lit a cigarette ‘with anachronistic gallantry’ - I can see him doing it 😮 - I laughed out loud at the visuals - describing a Brigadier as looking oddly formal, ‘as if he was the sole person in serif font’ …

Five stars for originality and the absolute joy of it. Graham Gore was a real person. He wasn't a famous historical figure, but a brave man (his photo and biography are included) and this surprising novel gave him a whole new and imagined life after the end of his own. I adored it. Thank you NetGalley, Kaliane Bradley and Hachette Australia for the ARC. Opinions are my own.

‘Forgiveness and hope are miracles. They let you change your life.’

I think The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley might be the most fun I’ve had with a book in AGES!

I was unsure at first. Time travel, romance, spies, history AND some speculative stuff thrown in for good measure? It’s a lot, and you have to suspend your disbelief for it to work.

Set in London in the near future, it’s about a civil servant who’s assigned to a special ministry project in which “expats” are collected from across history and brought back through time to the present. The experiment will test whether time travel is feasible, and what the consequences across the space-time continuum would be.

Her role is to act as a “bridge”: living with her assigned expat, Commander Graham Gore, and helping him adjust to modern life. And that will take some work - as far as history is concerned, Gore (who’s a real historical figure) died in 1847 on an expedition to the arctic. Suddenly he’s transported to a world of short skirts, washing machines and Spotify. Over the course of a year, the two grow too close…and the ministry’s true intentions are exposed.

I genuinely couldn’t stop reading this. It will require you to trust the author, abandon your sensibilities - but if you do, it’s wildly entertaining (if highly implausible 😂)

I know it feels like there’s a lot being tackled here, but Bradley pulls it off. I was gripped, and it has twist so delightful I actually gasped when I understood what was going on. It did get a little confusing there for a bit - I just went with it and hoped it would come together. It’s also funny, which I didn’t expect. Bradley is a writer to watch!

There’s so much heart in this novel, and it does tackle some ethical issues - not deeply, so keep those expectations in check. Your ability to enjoy it will probably depend on your willingness to embrace the premise and just have fun with the story. The whole thing is a bit of a romp, and it really does not require overthinking.

Thank you so much for my ARC!

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley is an intriguing and fun time travel romp. As someone who has enjoyed books like 'Lost in Time' and '11.22.36', this book takes some of the best from these novels whilst adding its own twist on the genre. I thoroughly enjoyed the relationship between the two protagonists, and thought the author did a very interesting job examining how individuals from different time periods would adapt to living in modern times. I also appreciated how the novel didn't spend too much time trying to explain the mechanics of time travel (as has been done quite often) and instead dived straight into the fish out of water scenarios that occurs when people displaced from time attempt to adapt to the modern world.

I found the interludes between chapters were a great way to understand Graham's character and were very enjoyable as a fan of historical fiction. I particularly enjoyed these sections as they reminded me of Richard Flanagan's 'Wanting', which was one of my favourite books during 2022.

What I think is most impressive about this book is how it manages to combine so many genres whilst never feeling overwhelming. As this novel is able to blend time travel, romance, mystery, thriller and many other genres, this novel is going to appeal to a very wide audience and I can see it being very well received.

Whilst the twist at the end was quite similar to what I have seen in similar works, I still thought it was a lot of fun and I can see it catching many readers of guard. I found that the whole final hour or so of the book flew by and kept me reading well into the night.

One of my main criticisms is not to do with the title itself, but rather with the formatting of the ebook. Very often there would be paragraph breaks between sentences, and it was sometimes hard to tell who was speaking, as multiple lines of dialogue would merge together. This is no fault of the author though, and I recognise that this could very well be an issue of transferring the e-pub file across to kindle.

Overall, I will definitely be recommending this title when it releases. This genre-blending novel is great for booksellers, as it has something that will appeal to a mass audience, making it very easy to recommend to our customers. I will definitely be keeping an eye out for what else Bradley releases in the future, as I thought this was a great debut.

I would like to give a massive thanks to NetGalley and Hachette Australia for providing this ARC, and I cannot wait until the 14th of May so that I can recommend this title to customers (many of whom I know will love this book), and my own friends and family.

This book is about a time-travel experiment gone wrong, where a woman acts as a "bridge" (or guide) to a 19th century man brought into the 21st century.

I really loved this book! I thought it was incredibly well-paced, with commentaries on race and individual vs. collective responsibility. While the main character was not always loveable, this felt realistic in a book about time travel, which enhanced the book's standing in my eyes. The nature of characters is not to be loveable, but to make mistakes and fall in love and do all the things we do in real life. The Ministry of Time achieves that and more for me.

The Ministry of Time is a genre crossing book which raises questions about the role of history in our future and the enduring legacy of colonialism.

We follow our unnamed narrator hired by a secretive government agency to be a bridge to the near future to Commander Graham Gore, a Victorian naval officer who has been lost in the footnotes of history. However, the government program is obscure for a reason and the protagonist must decide who she can trust.

Bradley captures the cultural disconnect between the “expats” or the characters plucked from history and their near-future London environment. As our narrator remarks about her charge:

“As it was he was thirty-seven years old, and had not experienced crinolines, A Tale of Two Cities or the enfranchisement of the working classes.”

Our narrator has a delightfully tongue-in-cheek perspective which is contrasted by her steadfast commitment to her charge, a relationship that goes from glorified babysitter to friend and perhaps something more. She struggles with her role in the government as the daughter of a Cambodian refugee. Is she living the dream of safety and security or is she a part of the colonial system that continues to cause global harm? Is it possible to be a victim and an oppressor in a colonial system?

Graham on the other hand is more outwardly colonial, convinced that his role in history is noble while struggling with the fact everyone he knows is dead. However, Gore is willing to learn and change as he adapts to his new environment. He is charming, stoic and curious and one of those characters you can't help but fall in love with.

“Today my overgrown son told a man on an e-scooter he was riding a coward’s vehicle. Today my overgrown son put metal in the microwave, deliberately, even though I told him not to do that, because he wanted to see what would happen.”

We get to see more of the other expats like Margaret “Maggie” Kemble a woman from 1665 who thrives in the near future, her character being vibrant and daring as a result of her newfound freedom. Then there’s sweet Arthur from 1916 who’s dealing with his time in the trenches. If anything I wanted more of the expats but I loved the moments we got to see of them adapting and at times thriving. Although all must deal with the cultural differences, proving that the past truly is another country.

The characters were deftly crafted and drove the action forward. There were times when the plot got a little lost and put on the back burner. My only other critique is that some lines appear overwritten, and where philsophising resulted in confusing metaphors. However, the occasional lack of clarity was more of a line editing rather than an overall coherence problem, so they may be fixed in the final product.

“When we reach the field, it was a line of darkness scrawled on the deeper darkness.”

The Ministry of TIme is a thought-provoking, oftentimes fun, dystopian, sci-fi, time-travel romance. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with this book and its characters.

On a very rare occasion, a book will come along that somehow combines several of my random niche interests and winds up absolutely captivating me. The Ministry of Time is that kind of book. In fact, I'll probably make it my entire personality for the next six months.

"In the near future, a disaffected civil servant is offered a lucrative job in a mysterious new government ministry gathering 'expats' from across history to test the limits of time-travel."

The protagonist works as a 'bridge' between the present and the past for the 'expat' Commander Graham Gore, who was supposed to die on Sir John Franklin's ill-fated expedition to the Arctic in 1847, as he navigates the modern world and reckons with the unexpected turn his life has taken.

It's incredibly thought provoking, with the author exploring themes of post-colonialism, history, displacement, identity, and agency. I was particularly struck by the protagonist's hypocrisy as she judges a person from the past's complicity with what was acceptable within the structures of power at that time, whilst entirely failing to examining her own in the present day.

It's also imaginative, funny, romantic, mysterious, heartbreaking, and wholly original. Easily the best thing I've read so far in 2024.

'The Ministry of Time' was one wild ride! I was initially drawn to it as time travel is one of my all-time favourite fiction tropes, but I stayed for the well developed and thoroughly enjoyable characters.

Thank you to Netgalley and Hachette Australia for providing me with an eARC of this title in exchange for an honest review.

'The Ministry of Time' follows a main character newly promoted to the titular highly-secretive UK government ministry. They're bringing 'expats', people presumed dead in their own times, to modern day to see what effects, if any, time travel has on the human body. Commander Graham Gore, a naval officer who presumably died in an 1840s expedition to the Arctic, is one of these 'expats' and our main character is assigned to 'bridge' him with his new life. Some of the best moments in this book are the comedic scenes that involve the 'expats' discovering foreign modern concepts such as the internet, cinema and online dating.

It's incredibly difficult to shoe-horn this book into any one genre, because it's content covers many. Because of the inclusion of time travel as a concept, it would be easy to assume it's science fiction - but the first half of the book is very light on the science despite this, and is more of a slice-of-life comedy as we watch the 'expats' navigate their way through modern society. The second half, on the other hand, is full of thrilling spy-action sequences, heavier on the science, and a touch of romance. I did not think I would be rooting for any romance in this book, but I absolutely ate it up and the ending had me giggling like a teenage girl. In addition to all of this, every other chapter is historical fiction following the ill-fated Franklin Expedition in the 1840s. Somehow, this mish-mash of genres works for this book - not just works, but works well.

Overall, this is a stunning debut novel that could be recommended to a wide range of readers. I look forward to seeing what Kaliane Bradley writes next!