4.1
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4,005 ratings
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK
“This summer’s hottest debut.” —Cosmopolitan • “Witty, sexy escapist fiction [that] packs a substantial punch...Fresh and thrilling.” —Los Angeles Times • “Electric...I loved every second.” —Emily Henry
“Utterly winning...Imagine if The Time Traveler’s Wife had an affair with A Gentleman in Moscow...Readers, I envy you: There’s a smart, witty novel in your future.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post
A time travel romance, a spy thriller, a workplace comedy, and an ingenious exploration of the nature of power and the potential for love to change it all: Welcome to The Ministry of Time, the exhilarating debut novel by Kaliane Bradley.
In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and is, shortly afterward, told what project she’ll be working on. A recently established government ministry is gathering “expats” from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible—for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time.
She is tasked with working as a “bridge”: living with, assisting, and monitoring the expat known as “1847” or Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to be living with an unmarried woman who regularly shows her calves, surrounded by outlandish concepts such as “washing machines,” “Spotify,” and “the collapse of the British Empire.” But with an appetite for discovery, a seven-a-day cigarette habit, and the support of a charming and chaotic cast of fellow expats, he soon adjusts.
Over the next year, what the bridge initially thought would be, at best, a horrifically uncomfortable roommate dynamic, evolves into something much deeper. By the time the true shape of the Ministry’s project comes to light, the bridge has fallen haphazardly, fervently in love, with consequences she never could have imagined. Forced to confront the choices that brought them together, the bridge must finally reckon with how—and whether she believes—what she does next can change the future.
An exquisitely original and feverishly fun fusion of genres and ideas, The Ministry of Time asks: What does it mean to defy history, when history is living in your house? Kaliane Bradley’s answer is a blazing, unforgettable testament to what we owe each other in a changing world.
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ISBN-10
1668045141
ISBN-13
978-1668045145
Print length
352 pages
Language
English
Publisher
Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
Publication date
May 06, 2024
Dimensions
6 x 1.2 x 9 inches
Item weight
2.31 pounds
Forgiveness, which takes you back to the person you were and lets you reset them. Hope, which exists in a future in which you are new. Forgiveness and hope are miracles. They let you change your life. They are time-travel.
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If you ever fall in love, you’ll be a person who was in love for the rest of your life.
Highlighted by 709 Kindle readers
This was one of my first lessons in how you make the future: moment by moment, you seal the doors of possibility behind you.
Highlighted by 608 Kindle readers
ASIN :
B0CL5FT5C3
File size :
3533 KB
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"[Bradley's] utterly winning book is a result of violating not so much the laws of physics as the boundaries of genre. Imagine if The Time Traveler’s Wife had an affair with A Gentleman in Moscow. . . You’d need a nuclear-powered flux capacitor to generate more charisma than Gore. . . His banter with the narrator crackles off the page . . . Readers, I envy you: There’s a smart, witty novel in your future."—Ron Charles, The Washington Post
"The Ministry of Time reads like a novel that was written for pleasure . . . this is the kind of summer romp that also sparks real thought. . . . [G]ive in to the tide of this book, and let it pull you along. It’s very smart; it’s very silly; and the obvious fun never obscures completely the sheer, gorgeous, wild stretch of her ideas."—Ella Risbridger, The Guardian
“Bradley pulls off a rare feat. The Ministry of Time doesn’t stoop to easy answers and doesn’t devolve into polemic. It’s a smart, gripping work that’s also a feast for the senses. An assassination, moles, questions of identity and violence wreak havoc on our happy lovers and the bubble they create in London. Yet our affection for them is as fresh and thrilling as theirs is for one another . . . An edgy, playful and provocative book that’s likely to be the most thought-provoking romance novel of the summer. "—Lauren LeBlanc, Los Angeles Times
"A hilarious yet poignant take on dislocation, loss, and oddball community . . . A twisty plotline that incorporates plenty of John le Carré and Mick Herron spy-craft references . . . with the silly, incisive, and spot-on comedy of Douglas Adams."—Daneet Steffens, The Boston Globe
“Bradley ‘s writing is clear and stylish, her dialogue dry and sprightly; the serious matters of love and mortality are cloaked in humour, but never too heavily . . . If you loved Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, or the big hit of 2022, Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, [The Ministry of Time] will be right up your street . . . A rattling good adventure story too, the twists at the end [are] perfectly earned . . . Don’t wait for this tale to come to the small screen. Crack this book open and you’ll see how time can disappear.”—Erica Wagner, Financial Times
“[The Ministry of Time] basically has everything you would want in a book in one incredible and exhilarating read that you'll definitely tell all your friends about.” —Cosmopolitan
"A revelatory page-turner."—People
“If you're a fan of Outlander, spy novels, time travel books, or just really innovative and fun storytelling, The Ministry of Time is definitely for you.” —Town & Country, "45 Must-Read Books of Spring 2024"
"This will be the book everyone is talking about this summer. Booksellers, social media, your parents, your teens. Everyone will simply love this time-traveling spy romance. It literally checks off all of the boxes for what a damn good book should be. Just go get it right now. Seriously."—Debutiful
"This is a lightning strike of a story that will appeal to fans of time travel, spy novels, romance, and bittersweet, satirical office drama alike. The result is part 'Kate and Leopold' and part Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.” —Polygon
"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 Funny Story
“Smart and affecting, full of ideas plus aslow-burning love story. It’s a wonderful debut.” —David Nicholls, New York Times bestselling author of One Day
"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
"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
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CHAPTER ONE
The interviewer said my name, which made my thoughts clip. I don’t say my name, not even in my head. She’d said it correctly, which people generally don’t.
“I’m Adela,” she said. She had an eye patch and blond hair the same color and texture as hay. “I’m the Vice Secretary.”
“Of…?”
“Have a seat.”
This was my sixth round of interviews. The job I was interviewing for was an internal posting. It had been marked SECURITY CLEARANCE REQUIRED because it was gauche to use the TOP SECRET stamps on paperwork with salary bands. I’d never been cleared to this security level, hence why no one would tell me what the job was. As it paid almost triple my current salary, I was happy to taste ignorance. I’d had to produce squeaky-clean grades in first aid, Safeguarding Vulnerable People, and the Home Office’s Life in the UK test to get this far. I knew that I would be working closely with refugees of high-interest status and particular needs, but I didn’t know from whence they were fleeing. I’d assumed politically important defectors from Russia or China.
Adela, Vice Secretary of God knows what, tucked a blond strand behind her ear with an audible crunch.
“Your mother was a refugee, wasn’t she?” she said, which is a demented way to begin a job interview.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Cambodia,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
I’d been asked this question a couple of times over the course of the interview process. Usually people asked it with an upward lilt, expecting me to correct them, because no one’s from Cambodia. You don’t look Cambodian, one early clown had said to me, then glowed like a pilot light because the interview was being recorded for staff monitoring and training purposes. He’d get a warning for that one. People say this to me a lot, and what they mean is: you look like one of the late-entering forms of white—Spanish maybe—and also like you’re not dragging a genocide around, which is good because that sort of thing makes people uncomfortable.
There was no genocide-adjacent follow-up: Any family still there [understanding moue]? Do you ever visit [sympathetic smile]? Beautiful country [darkening with tears]; when I visited [visible on lower lid] they were so friendly.…
Adela just nodded. I wondered if she’d go for the rare fourth option and pronounce the country dirty.
“She would never refer to herself as a refugee, or even a former refugee,” I added. “It’s been quite weird to hear people say that.”
“The people you will be working with are also unlikely to use the term. We prefer ‘expat.’ In answer to your question, I’m the Vice Secretary of Expatriation.”
“And they are expats from…?”
“History.”
“Sorry?”
Adela shrugged. “We have time-travel,” she said, like someone describing the coffee machine. “Welcome to the Ministry.”
Anyone who has ever watched a film with time-travel, or read a book with time-travel, or dissociated on a delayed public transport vehicle by 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 exist at the beginning and end of this account simultaneously, which is a kind of time-travel, and I’m here to tell you: don’t worry about it. All you need to know is that in your near future, the British government developed the means to travel through time but had not yet experimented with doing it.
In order to avoid the chaos inherent in changing the course of history—if “history” could be considered a cohesive and singular chronological narrative, another crock of shit—it was agreed that it would be necessary to extract people from historical war zones, natural disasters, and epidemics. These expatriates to the twenty-first century would have died in their own timelines anyway. Removing them from the past ought not to impact the future.
No one had any idea what traveling through time might do to the human body. So the second reason that it was important to pick people who would have died in their own timelines is that they might well die in ours, like deep-sea fish brought up to the beach. Perhaps there were only so many epochs the human nervous system could stand. If they got the temporal equivalent of the bends and sluiced into gray-and-pink jelly in a Ministry laboratory, at least it wouldn’t be, statistically speaking, murder.
Assuming that the “expats” survived, that meant they would be people, which is a complicating factor. When dealing with refugees, especially en masse, it’s better not to think of them as people. It messes with the paperwork. Nevertheless, when the expats were considered from a human rights perspective, they fit the Home Office criteria for asylum seekers. It would be ethically sparse to assess nothing but the physiological effects of time-travel. To know whether they had truly adjusted to the future, the expats needed to live in it, monitored by a full-time companion, which was, it transpired, the job I’d successfully interviewed for. They called us bridges, I think because “assistant” was below our pay grades.
Language has gone on a long walk from the nineteenth century. “Sensible” used to mean “sensitive.” “Gay” used to mean “jolly.” “Lunatic asylum” and “asylum seeker” both use the same basic meaning of “asylum”: an inviolable place of refuge and safety.
We were told we were bringing the expats to safety. We refused to see the blood and hair on the floor of the madhouse.
I was thrilled to get the job. I’d plateaued where I was, in the Languages department of the Ministry of Defence. I worked as a translator-consultant specializing in Southeast Asia, specifically Cambodia. I’d learned the languages I translated from at university. Despite my mother speaking Khmer to us at home, I hadn’t retained it through my formative years. I came to my heritage as a foreigner.
I liked my Languages job well enough, but I’d wanted to become a field agent, and after failing the field exams twice I was at a bit of a loss for career trajectory. It wasn’t what my parents had had in mind for me. When I was a very small child, my mother made her ambitions known. She wanted me to be prime minister. As prime minister, I would “do something” about British foreign policy and I would also take my parents to fancy governmental dinners. I would have a chauffeur. (My mother never learned to drive; the chauffeur was important.) Regrettably she also drilled the karmic repercussions of gossip and lying into me—the fourth Buddhist precept is unambiguous on this—and thus at the age of eight my political career was over before it began.
My younger sister was a far more skilled dissembler. I was dutiful with language, and she was evasive, pugnacious with it. This is why I became a translator and she became a writer—or at least she tried to become a writer and became a copy editor. I was paid considerably more than her, and my parents understood what my job was, so I would say that karma worked in my favor. My sister would say something along the lines of: Go fuck yourself. But I know she means it in a friendly way, probably.
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Kaliane Bradley
I am a writer and editor based in London. I've written short stories and essays, which have appeared in places like Catapult, Electric Literature, The Tangerine and Extra Teeth, among others. I was the winner of the 2022 Harper's Bazaar Short Story Prize and the 2022 V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize. The Ministry of Time is my debut novel.
I started writing The Ministry of Time after getting very invested in historical polar exploration, especially the 1845 Franklin Expedition and one of the officers on it, Graham Gore. The book grew out of a sort of literary parlour game I was writing for my friends: what would it be like if your favourite polar explorer lived in your house? It turns out that living with a Victorian man would probably force you to confront the legacy of British imperialism, the state of 21st century Britain - from climate crisis to Deliveroo - and the effect of the sexual revolution on flirting with a disorientated naval officer. It also forced me to confront, as a writer, the governmental apparatus that got this poor man into the 21st century in the first place... the course of sinister government project never did run smooth...
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Customer reviews
4.1 out of 5
4,005 global ratings
Avid Reader
5
Remarkable Story, Excellent Writing
Reviewed in the United States on July 22, 2024
Verified Purchase
The memorable protagonist of this compelling story is one of those characters who will live with you long after you’ve finished the book. This novel is a science fiction thriller, an intriguing mystery, and a poignant love story. The book isn’t perfect—the plot trips itself over some of the more convoluted storylines a couple of times—but the author’s talent is showcased throughout by the frequent uses of words that will cause the reader to stop simply to take a moment to enjoy the amazing phraseology. Read this for the story alone, but linger over its beauty.
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DJ
5
I didn’t see it coming
Reviewed in the United States on July 16, 2024
Verified Purchase
‘“I’m smiling too.” “Oh? My ears aren’t quite as good as yours, I can’t hear it.” “I will endeavor to smile louder.”’ (p175)
Wow.
I thought I had this book figured out early – a time travel novel that isn’t hard to follow. Interesting but straightforward premise. Skillful storytelling and sparkling prose. Relaxing, funny, engaging. Plenty of tension, drama, unpleasant events, and even a few big surprises -- but only as background for a story that’s basically about relationships. Not particularly deep, but includes a sprinkling of thoughtful commentary. Easily four stars.
But late in the book comes a spectacular development that turns the story on its head. Everything changes instantly. I realized I’d missed all the hints and teasers; I’d even highlighted a few. I should have seen it coming. I didn’t.
Here’s a small warning. Every time something unexpected happens in the book you’re going to ask yourself whether this is the “spectacular development”. No. If you have to ask, it’s not. Believe me, you’ll know when you get there.
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5 people found this helpful
Becket Hampton Warren
5
Fascinating, Deeply-Moving Story
Reviewed in the United States on July 8, 2024
Verified Purchase
I had no expectations, no preconceived notions about this novel when I purchased it; I’m not sure why I did. I am very glad I did. I’ve read novels about time-travelling characters, have read books about fish-out-of-water characters who might as well be from another time, so drastically have their situations changed. It’s a useful literary device. In these novels, often the time-traveler must conceal his or her, shall we say, original time-line, lest something dire occur or the future change. I’m thinking of Diana Gabaldon’s much-loved Outlander series, as well as a slew of romance novels I’ve encountered in my years as an avid reader of fiction.
The Ministry of Time, however, is as much about the concept of time-travel itself as it is the time-travelers. By this I don’t mean the physics of it, but its repercussions and complications, both personal and bureaucratic. Bradley sets the act of time-travel not in a scientist’s arcane laboratory or a magical/supernatural ring of standing stones, but in a government agency, a secret and yet almost comically mundane labyrinth of offices, reports, dossiers, and oversight. Yes, the novel considers what happens in the relationship between the now- and the then-characters who meet and interact in a time known to only one of them, but at the heart of it are the concepts of displacement and consent.
I felt an overwhelming need to begin the novel all over again when I finished it. I hope, if you are reading my review, that you find the book as fascinating as I did. As a reader I count myself well-satisfied by The Ministry of Time, but reading it has left me deeply thoughtful—troubled and unsettled, but also oddly hopeful.
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3 people found this helpful
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