Kaliane Bradley

A time travel romance, a speculative spy thriller, a workplace comedy, and an ingeniously constructed exploration of the nature of truth and 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 machine,” “Spotify,” and “the collapse of the British Empire.” But he adjusts quickly; he is, after all, an explorer by trade. Soon, what the bridge initially thought would be, at best, a seriously uncomfortable housemate dynamic, evolves into something much more. Over the course of an unprecedented year, Gore and the bridge fall haphazardly, fervently in love, with consequences they never could have imagined. Supported by a chaotic and charming cast of characters—including a 17th-century cinephile who can’t get enough of Tinder, a painfully shy World War I captain, and a former spy with an ever-changing series of cosmetic surgery alterations and a belligerent attitude to HR—the bridge will be forced to confront the past that shaped her choices, and the choices that will shape the future. An exquisitely original and feverishly fun fusion of genres and ideas, The Ministry of Time asks the universal question: What happens if you put a disaffected millennial and a Victorian polar explorer in a house together?

A Novel

The Ministry of Time

abi a

Forgiveness and hope are miracles. They let you change your life. They are time travel.

Lindsay

An underrated symptom of inherited trauma is how socially awkward it is to live with.

This was one of my first lessons on how you make the future: moment by moment, you seal the doors of possibility behind you.

I note all this, because I think male writers are often mocked for their lengthy descriptions of women's breasts. But I do think some breasts provoke them, even from me.

When something changes you constitutionally, you say 'the earth moved'. But the earth stays the same, it's your relationship with the ground that shifts.

Rebecca Harwood

Life is a series of slamming doors. We make irrevocable decisions everyday. A 12 second delay, a slip of the tongue and all of a sudden your life is on a new road. 

kamille

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.

Jemima Scott

‘One never understands one's use but through the opinion of others.’

‘But, you know, you can make yourself feel lonely and miserable and out of joint just by falling in love with someone who can't or won't love you back.’

‘If you ever fall in love, you'll be a person who was in love for the rest of your life.’

The Ministry of Time quotes

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