Kaliane Bradley

ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF SUMMER 2024 • A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • HUGO AWARD FINALIST FOR BEST NOVEL • WINNER OF THE GOODREADS CHOICE AWARD FOR SCIENCE FICTION • A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR, VANITY FAIR, ESQUIRE, VOX, GOOD HOUSEKEEPING, THE INDEPENDENT, PARADE, KIRKUS REVIEWS, AND MORE… “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.

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.

Emma Hak-Kovacs

“I don't think it's very polite of you to say there are germs in my mouth.”

“There are germs in everyone's mouths.”

“There'll be germs on your shoes and under your nails. It's just how the world works. An aseptic environment is. Well. It's a dead one.”

“I’ll write a strongly worded letter of complaint."

Language informed experience - that we did not simply describe, but create our world through language.

It was my turn to cook. I made the dish I thought was most likely to symbolically kill a Victorian child with the ingredients I had to hand, which was mapo tofu with a belligerent amount of garlic and mala.

The Ministry of Time quotes

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