"An outrageously brilliant debut with a premise that just gets more and more original. The Ministry of Time pulls off the neatest trick of speculative fiction, first estranging us from our own era, and then facilitating our immigration back into the present; but it is also a love story, exploratory, sensitive, charged with possibility, and powered by desire, reminding us that history is synonymous with human beings, and that we all have the ability to change it. This is already the best new book I will have read next year." —Eleanor Catton, author of Birnam Wood
“The Ministry of Time is as electric, charming, whimsical, and strange as its ripped-from-history cast. (Extremely.) I loved every second I spent wrapped up in Kaliane Bradley's stunning prose, the moments that made me laugh and those that made my heart ache. This is a book that surprises as much as it delights, and I'm already impatiently waiting for whatever Bradley concocts next." —Emily Henry, author of Happy Place
"Fantastically fun and unmistakably urgent, The Ministry of Time is an ecstatic celebration of fiction in all its vehement, ungovernable, mutinous glory." —Megha Majumdar, author of A Burning
"Holy smokes, this novel is an absolute cut above! Kaliane Bradley leaps into a storytelling league of her own. This book is deadly serious speculative fiction, but it is also one of the funniest books I've read in years. It's exciting, surprising, intellectually provocative, weird, radical, tender, and moving. I missed it when I was away from it. I will hurry to re-read it. Make room on your bookshelves for a new classic." —Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers
"Hugely enjoyable: ingeniously constructed, beautifully written, and unexpectedly sexy. It is the rarest of creations: a boldly entertaining page-tuner that is also deeply, thoughtfully engaged with our past, present and future." —Joanna Quinn, author of The Whalebone Theatre
"Kaliane Bradley writes with the maximalist confidence of P. G. Wodehouse, but also with the page-turning pining of Sally Rooney. It's thought-provoking and horribly clever—but it also made me laugh out loud." —Alice Winn, author of In Memoriam
"I haven’t enjoyed a book this much for a very long time. It’s wonderful, joyful, intelligent and hilarious. I underlined as I read and felt a strong sadness at finishing because I could not read it again for the first time." —Daisy Johnson, author of Sisters
"A fantastic debut: conceptually brilliant, really funny, genuinely moving, written in the most exquisite language and with a wonderful articulation of the knotty complexities of a mixed-race heritage." —Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime
"The Ministry of Time is a feast of a novel—singular, alarming and (above all) incredibly sexy. An astonishingly assured debut, offering weird and unexpected delights on every page. I will be running towards whatever Kaliane Bradley writes next." —Julia Armfield, author of Our Wives Under the Sea
"Sly and illusionless in its use of history, lovely in its sentences, warm—no, hotter than that—in its characterisation, devastating in its denouement. A weird, kind, clever, heartsick little time bomb of a book." —Francis Spufford, author of Golden Hill
"What a stunning and remarkable wonder! What if time travel was run by a bureaucracy? . . . There's something here for everyone—world history, side-splitting humour, lusty tension, brilliant prose, and characters to root for desperately. . . The Ministry of Time is the most vibe-forward book I have ever read." —Vanessa Chan, author of The Storm We Made
“The Ministry of Time encapsulates life's paradoxes as easily as it transcends genre. Readers may see echoes of Severance's disaffected second-generation office worker-turned-heroine, or the romantic time travel adventure of Outlander, but Kaliane Bradley has created something equally brilliant and entirely her own.” —Shelf Awareness
"A thrilling time-travelling romance about a real-life Victorian polar explorer who is brought from the past into 21st-century London as part of a government experiment. . . A weird, funny mash-up of The Time Traveler’s Wife and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow." —The Times UK
"Told over space and time, Bradley’s debut is at once an outrageously fun comedy while also providing keen analyses on the nature of colonialism, power and bureaucracy. One not to miss." —Dazed
★ 2024-02-03
A time-toying spy romance that’s truly a thriller.
In the author’s note following the moving conclusion of her gripping, gleefully delicious debut novel, Bradley explains how she gathered historical facts about Lt. Graham Gore, a real-life Victorian naval officer and polar explorer, then “extrapolated a great deal” about him to come up with one of her main characters, a curly-haired, chain-smoking, devastatingly charming dreamboat who has been transported through time. Having also found inspiration in the sole extant daguerreotype of Gore, showing him to have been “a very attractive man,” Bradley wrote the earliest draft of the book for a cluster of friends who were similarly passionate about polar explorers. Her finished novel—taut, artfully unspooled, and vividly written—retains the kind of insouciant joy and intimacy you might expect from a book with those origins. It’s also breathtakingly sexy. The time-toggling plot focuses on the plight of a British civil servant who takes a high-paying job on a secret mission, working as a “bridge” to help time-traveling “expats” resettle in 21st-century London—and who falls hard for her charge, the aforementioned Commander Gore. Drama, intrigue, and romance ensue. And while this quasi-futuristic tale of time and tenderness never seems to take itself too seriously, it also offers a meaningful, nuanced perspective on the challenges we face, the choices we make, and the way we live and love today.
This rip-roaring romp pivots between past and present and posits the future-altering power of love, hope, and forgiveness.
