The Ministry of Time
By Kaliane Bradley
- Genre
- Science Fiction & Speculative Fiction
- Publisher
- Avid Reader Press (Simon & Schuster)
- Publication year
- 2024
- ISBN
- 9781668045145
In near-future London, a government project brings people from the past into the present. A civil servant is assigned to live with and monitor a naval officer plucked from an 1847 Arctic expedition, and an unexpected relationship develops as the project's dangers surface. Kaliane Bradley's debut...
A secret British ministry has learned to pull people out of the past, and its newest 'expat' is Commander Graham Gore, a real Victorian naval officer rescued from Sir John Franklin's doomed Arctic expedition. Kaliane Bradley's sparkling debut assigns an unnamed civil servant to house and acclimatize him, and from that odd-couple premise spins something rare: a novel that is at once a swoony romance, a witty fish-out-of-water comedy, a spy thriller and a thoughtful meditation on empire, refugees and the ethics of the present's power over the past. Bradley writes with real charm and a sharp contemporary voice, letting the culture-clash jokes land while never losing sight of harder questions about who gets to belong. The genre-blending is the point and the pleasure, and if the plot's thriller machinery is less assured than its characters, the characters are more than enough. A word-of-mouth sensation and prize magnet, it is clever, sexy and surprisingly moving - one of the breakout speculative debuts of the decade.