WOW. WOW. WOW.

I was not expecting that book to put my mind in a vice and squeeze all the emotions out of it like that. What a ride!

The slow burn was so perfect here that when the main characters finally kissed I had to put the book away, as I was on public transport and blushing like a loon.

Riveting, hellishly clever, and overwhelmingly sensual. This is my favourite read of 2024 so far.

Ps. Cast Maya Erskine and Tom Hiddleston in the film adaptation NOW.

This is not my usual genre but as a lifelong Doctor Who fan I was intrigued by the time travel concept. In general, I enjoyed the book but some parts were glossed over rather quickly. We don’t get an explanation of how time travel has been arrived at- it’s accepted within the ministry as a fait accompli. There is a cast of ‘refugees’ from across the time frame ( kinda reminded me of the tv series Ghosts). Will they all survive? What can they offer the ‘present’ day? There is a strong relationship at the centre of the book which anchors the narrative. The ending was partly surprising but also obvious if the point of the story is remembered. If this is a debut, can’t wait for the next one! Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for an ARC.

This book is everything I love about reading. I read to escape (mainly, but not solely!), and so science fiction/ fantasy has always appealed to me. Now I’ve discovered speculative fiction, and it seems to be like both of these things wrapped up in a package with a label saying: “This Seems Plausible”.

The Ministry of Time is a clever book - it uses time travel and science fiction, with a touch of history that actually happened, and mixes it up with a hefty dose of romance, thriller and literary fiction. It doesn’t sound like it will work, but I’m here to say that it really DOES!

Ok, so a quick, yet vague, synopsis: the British Government has come into possession of a device that can go back in time and find particular people in the past. It’s been decided that the people they take are all in life-threatening situations. Those plucked from their time are placed with a “Bridge”; someone who will facilitate their integration into modern society.

The main pair is that of Graham Gore, a Polar explorer from the Erebus expedition, and his Bridge, a woman whose mother escaped the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Not an easy adjustment for a Victorian man. This Bridge is the narrator.

Graham Gore adjusts quickly to modern life, but is modern life willing to accept him? And what affect does it have on him and his fellow time travellers, to be so out of time?

There was so much to think about whilst reading this - I was completely immersed, and it ended FAR too quickly!

An extremely hyped book for a reason - I know exactly which readers to recommend it to, those who love a new buzzy high-concept novel that spans multiple genres (romance, sci-fi, spy thrillers). Not quite for me but that's not to say it won't thrill many readers, will be recommending. Found the first half very slow, but it definitely picks up at a certain point (no spoilers).

Whilst The Ministry of Time is absolutely not the book I was sold (lor thought I was being sold), it is far better than that book could ever have been. Expecting a standard popcorn time-travel thriller, I was ready to tun my brain off for a while, but Kaliane Bradley's style and the wonderful characters soon put paid to that idea.

It is a superb premise, what if there was a time door and what if the government set up an experiment with said door and brought back incidental figures from history and observed them in modern life? This is a clever, thrilling, superbly realised and impeccably researched novel that I can highly recommend. It is little surprise that the BBC are adapting the book into a TV series, and I look forward to that immensely.

Fantastic idea, really well executed. The characters leapt off the page and the love story was very well drawn. However I feel like the plot was stretched rather thinly and the book failed to hold my interest for that reason. A good, rather than a great read.

A woman of Cambodian and British heritage, known only to the reader as The Bridge, takes a top secret job in the new Ministry of Time. She's quickly told, with no fuss or fanfare, that the British government have discovered time travel and have “rescued” a number of people from the past just before they were about to die. She is paired with one “expat”, Commander Graham Gore, who is a real historical figure, an Arctic Explorer who died in 1846. As they grow closer over the year and blur their professional boundaries irrevocably, the Bridge is torn between her duty to the Ministry and her new loyalty to Gore.

Bradley is unflinching in how she treats the protagonist, who is avoidant in the extreme, while still narrating the book in a way that seems very frank, but also strangely defensive too. On reflection after finishing, I thought a lot about what the book has to say about individual responsibility even in the face of overwhelming power (like the Ministry) or in the face of other larger systems (in this book, racism and climate change), and even in day to day lives with our friends, family, colleagues and loved ones.

The underlying theme is that of displacement - the Bridge’s Cambodian mother displaced after atrocities in her home countries is somewhat aligned with Commander Gore displaced from his native time. Bradley also points to a vision in the future that we unfortunately can guess is really coming, which is the increase of displaced peoples as climate change makes more and more of our land uninhabitable. As Bradley writes so beautifully, “The rhythms of loss and asylum, exodus and loneliness, roll like floods across human history”

It's a strange book in some ways, and also just gas in others, and one I really underestimated but ended up so, so impressed with. I'll be thinking about it for a long while.

The Ministry of Time is an engaging read from start to finish. It takes the star crossed lovers meeting through time in the other direction than usual. So rather than the protagonist going back and being guided through a different time, the time traveller comes to a time slightly in the future, and the protagonist is the guide. It makes for an interesting premise. Even if you take away all the technological advancements, how could a man from the 19th century (or even 20th) deal with the changes in behaviour of both women and men? How could you get someone ready? Well, that's why the Ministry employ 'bridges'. These are the people tasked with adjusting these time refugees who have no idea why they've been plucked out of time to adjust to the modern world. And our 'bridge' is more than happy to help her charge, '1847' AKA Commander Graham Gore 'adjust' to modern sensibilities.

There's a lot of hype for this book. I'm not 100% sure it's deserving of that, but it is a great story. Somehow, I feel the story will suit its next incarnation as a TV series better than the written word.

The Book’s Basics

Title: The Ministry of Time

Author: Kaliane Bradley

Series: No

Genre: Near-Future, Sci-Fi

Length: 368 pages

Initial Reaction: Overall, I really enjoyed it. It was cute in places and through-provoking in others.

I received a galley of this book from NetGalley without charge in exchange for an honest review.

Britain has a secret governmental department that has time travel technology. It is quite new, so they have started a bridge program where they’ve taken people from periods in time where they were supposedly to have died so that they won’t be missed (and are called “expats”).

Our main character is a Bridge, someone to help their person from the past integrate into modern society and ensure they are healthy, gets paired up with Graham Gore. He is a man taken from the mid-1800s from an Arctic exploration mission which had gone horribly wrong.

The story follows how Gore and the others are adjusting, discovering modern inventions and ways of thinking, while also battling with leaving their old lives and families behind.

It looks into the Bridges and how they try to manoeuvre around the expats to help them adjust, but also to not make them too uncomfortable. They also have to wade through bureaucracy and learn when to question who is actually on their side.

I would recommend this book to most people, as long has they’re happy with some spice. It had elements of spy thriller, romance, history, and character focused writing, but with enough pace to not be slow.

I enjoyed the romance and Gore is adorable in parts of the book, both because of his Victorian sensibilities and because of who he is. He is charming, witty, and headstrong.

I disliked the main character for a bit, which I think was done intentionally, but it was done with purpose. The story does get darker towards the end – I wouldn’t consider this a “light” read, but it was reasonably fast paced.

There were some really great quotes, especially towards the end. I won’t share those because I don’t want to give away too much of the story. A lot were insightful, but my favourite is:

“If a black hole could sneeze, it might have looked like this.” – page 326

This is a book I will be returning to, both in my thoughts and through future re-reads (I’ve already bought my own copy).

I am an unpublished writer, but I’m working towards being published some day, so when I read a book I am trying to be more aware of the author’s craft and what I can learn from them.

One of the most important things when writing a story, arguably the most important thing, is how you make the reader feel while and after they have read the book. In this book, I feel like I’m grieving a man who died nearly 200 years ago. Not the character, but kind of through the character.

In reality, was a real man who died young and tragically. The story lets him live on in contemporary minds, even if it is a fictionalised version of him. In the Afterword, Bradley talks about how she pieced together the character of Gore through small notes about him through his words and others. She used these to weave the character of Graham Gore and I think did a really good job.

It left me with a sense of hope – a kind of second chance for Gore, and, certainly, a chance for his name to be known.

I’m not saying I’ll write fictionalised versions of real people in my stories, especially as my focus is primarily on Fantasy, but I think it could be an interesting study about how to make a character feel real from small tidbits of information – how small actions and reverberations of those actions create a whole character. The Afterward is very much worth reading as Bradley goes into how she created the character of Gore, primarily from what other people noted of him. That he is based on a real person gives it a certain weight of meaning, but I think even if he was entirely fictionalised the character would have felt real and what I’m feeling now having read the book would be similar.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for providing a copy in exchange for an honest review.

Given all I had heard about this book, I was SO excited to start but it didn’t work for me at all. For all the things The Ministry of Time was trying to do I don’t think it succeeded at any of them. The prose was sluggish so every time I put the book down I was never anticipating picking it up again. I wasn’t invested in the romance at all and mostly found it cringey. I love a time travel story but that didn’t feel fleshed out either.

An intriguing premise - a recently established government. Ministry is gathering ex-pats from history to establish whether time travel is feasible. It’s set in the near future, and they have discovered a time travel door.

I found the first third of the book very strong . Particularly like the comment about the British empire, treating other countries like her father treated elastic bands dropped by the postman. Oh that might be useful. I’ll keep that for later.

Unfortunately, the second third of the book was a bit too much The Time Traveller’s Wife for me, but it picked up again in the last third of the book.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

This was one of my Most Anticipated releases of the year and I’m happy to report that it pretty much lived up to my high hopes. I rightly had in mind that it would be a zany time-travel romance involving a modern-day civil servant falling in love with her charge, who was a real-life Victorian polar explorer. The blurb had me expecting something rather light and one-dimensional, so it was a pleasant surprise to find that this nuanced debut novel alternately goes along with and flouts the tropes of spy fiction and science fiction, and makes clever observations about how we frame stories of empire and progress.

The unnamed first-person narrator is, like Bradley, a young British-Cambodian woman. She is blasé about her government work in languages and relishes the chance to do something a bit different. After a rigorous set of interviews for the Ministry’s mysterious new project, she is hired as a “bridge” helping to resettle one of five “expatriates” from history in near-future London. Her expat is “1847,” 38-year-old Commander Graham Gore, rescued before his death on Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated Arctic expedition.

Two of the other expats, Arthur aka “1916” and seventeenth-century nonconformist Margaret Kemble (both queer), become Gore’s close friends. It’s a delight to watch these characters take up new vocabulary and technology and handpick the things they appreciate about popular culture. There are some hilarious scenes of the gang all together, particularly those involving music: Arthur and Graham put on a ‘disco’, the narrator teaches them all to do the electric slide before a clubbing outing, and they have a go on a theremin.

Gore lives in the narrator’s flat while she oversees his adjustment. At times he feels like her “overgrown son,” testing the boundaries and expressing knee-jerk disapproval of things he doesn’t understand. Gradually their bizarre housemate situation turns into an odd-couple romance. “He was an anachronism, a puzzle, a piss-take, a problem, but he was, above all things, a charming man. … I was concussed with love for him. I bent my head to the cudgel.”

Although this feels like wish-fulfilment (imagine choosing a historical figure you find vaguely hot, bringing them back to life, and then giving your fictional stand-in a chance with them), Bradley doesn’t completely gloss over the difficulties their backgrounds and mores would cause. Most noteworthy is his exoticization of her as a mixed-race woman. Occasional passages in archaic font introducing vignettes from Gore’s time in the Arctic suggest that his reaction to the narrator may be informed by a pivotal encounter he had with a bereaved Inuit woman. The expats undergo intense sensitivity training, but the imperial mindset is hard to root out, and even the narrator, whose mother was a refugee from the Khmer Rouge, isn’t sure she’s always getting it right when it comes to racism and assimilation.

Bradley’s descriptive prose is a highlight (“he looked oddly formal, as if he was the sole person in serif font”; “A great graphite pencil inscribed the diagonal journey of water on the air”), memorable but never too quirky just for the sake of it. At a certain point, plot starts to take over and pushes aside the quiet playfulness of the culture shock scenes. I did miss the innocent joy, but that’s Bradley’s point: mess around with the past and grave consequences are bound to follow. We learn that the Ministry has a double agent, that there are visitors from later centuries as well as previous ones, and that the narrator’s own future is at stake.

Maybe because I don’t read hard SF, it didn’t bother me that the explanations and world-building are a little bit thin here. You just have to suspend disbelief at the start and then go with it. The result is a witty, sexy, off-kilter gem. I haven’t had so much sheer fun with a book since Curtis Sittenfeld’s Romantic Comedy, and I will be looking out for whatever Bradley writes next.

Such an unusual book ! So glad to have read it and enjoyed it -its about a woman who works for the ministry as a field agent or 'Bridge' and she is in charge of Commander Graham Gore who has been extracted from 1847 through a portal and is one of a handful from different times who have been bought back from the past. It is part love story, part thriller and part Sci-Fi - I loved all of the aspects of this book and I imagine someone will be turning it into a film.

I am a massive fan of time travel novels and knew a bit about Erebus (thanks to Michael Palin) so the concept of this, book, where in the nearish future the Government has found out how to transport people through time, and as an experiment has gathered people they knew were about to die (from historical documents) and transported them to live in modern day London with their handlers (bridges) is right up my street.
Graham Gore has been plucked from the ill-fated Erebus expedition and is placed with his bridge, who is a languages expert whose mother was a refugee. She is the narrator of this story. I was really unsure what direction this novel would take but it is less about the differences between times and more about human relationships and what it is to be an immigrant, geographically or temporally. There’s a fair bit of excitement towards the last quarter of the book where a revelation made me gasp out loud. Turns out that time travel makes life very complicated. Unsurprisingly.
This is a smart, romantic, and thoughtful novel.
Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

What would you do if you 'discovered' time travel? Would you (a) activate your device, use it and think about the consequences after or (b) take a more cautious approach?

The titular Ministry takes the latter approach and abducts several historically insignificant people just before they're about to die. Each of the five 'expats', another couple have died anyway, is paired with a civil service 'bridge' to help them acclimatise to the present and observe what effect time travel's had upon them.

Our nameless narrator is one such 'bridge'. Assigned to Commander Graham Gore, one of Franklin's lost Arctic expedition, they spend one long, hot, near-future summer together. Growing closer and closer as the time-lost Gore finds his feet in the now.

Throw a conspiracy into the mix and you have a quirky, rom-com, time travel caper. Yes, I don't usually do romance, but when I do it tends to be quirky and surprisingly enjoyable.

Maybe the conspiracy that underpins everything doesn't really hold up to close scrutiny, if you really think about it you start to spot gaping holes, but when the characters are as strong as they are and the use of time travel as original as it is that's something that you can almost overlook.

I've got my fingers crossed for a sequel. There are enough hints and loose ends to suggest that one could be forthcoming.

Thanks to NetGalley, Sceptre, Hodder & Stoughton and the author for an advance review copy.

Fascinating! I really enjoyed the initial disparity between the “ex-pats” and their handlers, known as their Bridge.

Imagine travelling to the present day from the 1800s, where there is no internet, no Spotify, single men and women live together out of wedlock, women go to the pub, indoor smoking is prohibited and everyday words from your time, like “negro” are racist and you just don’t understand why! And as for no servants? Oh, but there’s a dishwasher and a washing machine, so no need to panic!

Commander Graham Gore is one of the few chosen to be transported from the 1800s to 20?? something in the near future. With a young, disgruntled civil servant as his “bridge”, the present day person responsible for helping the wide eyed time traveller transition into the current time. Their initial awkwardness grows into friendship and then a far deeper, romantic relationship.

This is a well researched, brilliantly written and serious book, but with a generous smattering of dry humour, which I loved. A refreshing and original book, which deserves every one of it's FIVE STARS. The mix of historical fact and fiction worked perfectly in this mixed-genre gem of a read. A time travel, spy, suspense thriller with romance and a bit of spice. Fabulous!

5 ⭐️ Thanks to Netgalley, Kaliane Bradley and Hodder and Stoughton for an ARC in return for an honest review.

Such an original engaging book.
The writing flowed and there was humour too. It was entertaining seeing our world through the eyes of the expats and the writer did a great job describing their reactions to things beyond their experience.
The sci-fi part was well done as was the intrigue at the Ministry although parts of the plot went over my head towards the end.

What fun The Ministry of Time is!

I’ve been describing it as part Catch-22, part Bond, part Time Travellers Wife. Our narrator is part of a government project which brings people from the past to the present (set in the near future). The narrator is to work as a ‘bridge’ for her time traveller to help him acclimatise. As the scheme continues, the motives and safety of it are called into question. Does good triumph over all? Good for who?

Genuinely had such a good time reading this. Sci-fi is not normally my thing but I thought I would give it a go anyways and I’m so glad I did. I could see this appealing to loads of different people, it would make a great holiday read - propulsive, intriguing and humorous. Save space in your suitcase by reading the same book as your boyfriend!!!

It’s not just a romp either - really interesting considerations of colonialism, culture and how it changes over time. This would make it a great book club pick too IMO.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the eARC - I had such a good time!

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.

Oh wow, I am so in Love with this book. Like heart-pounding, pupil-dilating, sweaty-palmed LURVE!
The writing is fluid, very funny and perfect. The premise is genius. The characters are achingly fantastic. For those who have read this - did you not have a crush on Graham Gore? (Real life character - A Commander of the fabled Franklin/Erebus Arctic expedition).
Okay, so there’s time travel. And what I Love about Kaliane Bradley’s approach to the often knotty and mind-blowing concept of time travel is ‘It is what it is’ and you don’t feel at all cheated that the scientific workings are not expanded upon too much.
The slow-burning love affair (and I won’t spoil it and say between whom) is perhaps the most beautiful and visceral description of falling in love that I’ve ever read. Kaliane Bradley certainly has a ‘turn of phrase’ that is perfection.
Possibly my favourite book of the year!