History records that in 1845, Captain Sir John Franklin led a British expedition to find the Northwest Passage through Canada. It turned out to be one of the worst disasters in the history of polar exploration. In all, 129 officers and crew members were lost – that is, everyone on board the two ships that sailed. One of the officers was Graham Gore, who in this story has been plucked from the ice (shortly before it’s presumed everyone starved to death) and transported to London. Set in the near future, a UK ministry has discovered a time travel door and has managed to bring a small group of people, from various years, back through it. Each was transferred shortly before the date they were believed to have been due to die, this being an attempt to minimise the likely impact of their removal.

Gore and the others are each supported by a ministry employee known as a Bridge. The job of the Bridge is to live with the time traveller, control and monitor their movements, and generally help them adjust to this new world they find themselves in. We will meet all of these characters, but the main emphasis here is on the relationship between Gore (a man in his mid-thirties) and his young female Bridge. In effect, this is a convoluted love story.

The time travel methodology is never really explored, the focus being on the people and how they adjust to this modern world, and also on the mystery surrounding the ministry itself: both its purpose and it’s rather overbearing senior personnel. In typical time travel novel style, quite a bit of coverage is given to the incongruities of modern life for these people who have all travelled from more primitive times. For me, this repetitive theme quickly became rather trite and uninteresting. Also, aside from the budding romance, very little else was actually happening. Then, it started to get very confusing. The narrative, initially slow and somewhat dull, suddenly becomes fast-moving and jumpy. My mind couldn’t follow the series of seemingly random happenings. It transpires that there is some logic here and even an interesting surprise, but it takes some time for things to become clear.

A time travel story provides an almost unlimited licence to introduce strange and sometimes wonderful twists. But in so doing, there is a need to engage the reader/listener and make them part of the journey. Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveller's Wife is a confusing jumble saved by the most wonderful ending imaginable and Stephen King’s 11/22/63 is an imaginative exploration of a major event in American history – these stories are amongst my most memorable audiobook experiences. But despite being competently narrated, this novel just failed to engage me, nor did it deliver the level of excitement or eye watering surprises I was hoping for. In truth, I found it all a bit of a mess, and in the end, a disappointment.

The Ministry of Time is sure to be my favourite book of 2024, despite being only a third of the way through the year when I read it. It may be cliche to say, but it really is a book that has everything, crossing genres and written with such a huge amount of heart.

Speculative fiction at its finest, this book has enough science-fiction tropes to be of interest to sci-fi fans, whilst being realistic enough to be perfect for people who aren't drawn to this genre.

Our unnamed protagonist and the commander and the perfect characters, I was drawn to them in such a strong, compelling way, that I felt utterly bereft when the book was finished. Perfectly flawed, enigmatic and entertaining, they are characters who's story will continue in my mind for a long time. You really know that you are drawn to characters in a book when their misguided actions make you weep as much as if they had been directed at you.

Bradley captures the beauty of pain like no other and I genuinely look forward to seeing what she comes up with next.

I have also read this book (see review below). I thought the audiobook was really well done and the two narrators were great.

I enjoyed the novel and whilst the premise was engaging, interesting and made me want to explore further, there were parts that either went on for too long or seemed somewhat out of keeping with rest of the book. I'm no prude but found that the sex scenes were cumbersome and went on too long; if you're positioning the book as an Outlander-esque speculative romance, then I guess this in keeping with that direction, but didn't really work for me. I did really enjoy how the historic characters had to familiarise themselves with the modern world and felt this was the strongest part of the book. On occasion, some of the writing lacked something, with lines such as the acne on someone's breasts resembling crumbs from a pink wafer? Didn't work for me. I do feel that the middle third lacks much engagement and let the rest of the novel down and the twists - whilst not overbearing - were fairly predictable.

This was good fun. After reading 'In Ascension' last year and loving it, I wanted to read more 'literary' science fiction novels. This is less scientific and a bit lighter, but it certainly fits the bill.

It is set in our time and the British government has somehow acquired a time travel device (we learn later how, and it's quite funny) and our main character - a young translator - is tasked to act as 'bridge' for one of the time travelers that is brought in from the past: a Commander in the British Navy teleported from 1847 during the lost Erebus expedition.

It is in fact the charming and quite brilliant Commander who carries this novel, as he gets used to (and appalled by) the 21st century with its lack of manners, dubious morals and mind-blowing technology.

When the Commander accidentally discovers a mysterious device, things take a dark turn and it appears they are part of a plot that involves multiple generations.

Thank you to NetGalley and Sceptre for the review copy of this audiobook.

The narrator is a British civil servant employed as a "bridge" to Graham Gore, who was a real person and member of the disastrous Franklin expedition, as part of a secretive mission to supposedly test if a group of "expats" can survive for 1 year under close supervision then eventually assimilate into modern Britain.

I loved Graham and the other “expat” characters! I was moved by the sense of community which developed between these time travellers (or kidnapping victims, depending on your perspective), and how they each explored what the 21st century could offer them. All from wildly different eras but forced together by the Ministry, they felt fully alive to me with hilarious idiosyncrasies and I cried over them more than once.

Unfortunately the actual plot fell short of my expectations. There were a lot of truly delightful surprises throughout but too many sudden twists in the last few chapters that were random, confusing, or both.

Ultimately the biggest disappointment was the romance - I enjoyed the slow burn and their friendship but towards the end of the book I just couldn’t root for the narrator and Graham to stay together.

The narrator was also bizarrely incurious about the Ministry's machinations, and since she barely wondered why or how the British government had graciously saved these characters from certain death in their own time periods I found it was a struggle to even care myself or fully understand once I finally got to the hurriedly revealed answer.

This book is being marketed as “a time travel romance, a speculative spy thriller, a workplace comedy” but it doesn’t successfully juggle all those genres.

I still recommend The Ministry of Time, because some of the characters were unbelievably fun and I can't remember the last time I laughed this much while reading a book, but if you’re mainly looking for a spy thriller then you might be disappointed by this.

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley is an unputdownable, superbly executed, book. With beautifully well-drawn characters who slip into your heart. Historical, while being time travel, and romantic, while being a thriller. You have to read it! I’ve never read a time travel book so effective as this at showing the differences between people of different centuries! Just brilliant.
Also, I couldn't help but smile at the descriptions. “I made a noise like a slapped canary” and a protagonist who doesn’t like Guinness describes it as “angry marmite”! :))

I LOVED this book! Time travel, romance, thriller, comedy. It seriously is the everything of books! In fact you can tell how much I loved it by how many times I tweeted about it :)
It's up there in my top ten books of all time, it's that good. I listened to the audiobook and it was beautifully narrated. The narrator brought these wonderful characters to life. I could listen again!

As the title indicates, this is a travel time related story. The UK Government has discovered a way to bring back people from other times. Those people are called refugees, because of the needs they have once they are in our time. Soon, our MC gets too involved in this for her own good.
I found the story interesting, although the time travelling method itself is not explained. Of course.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC copy of this title.

This is such a fun concept and it delivered.

I absolutely loved the characters in this book and their dynamic, they are both likable and had a lot of chemistry.

I liked that it didn't over explain anything, it wasn't trying to be sci-fi in that sense and I think it being more character driven paid off.

I had lots of moments where I laughed out loud and my attention was captured throughout. I would highly recommend this if the synopsis sounds interesting to you, as it is everything it says it is.

Thank you!

The audiobook is narrated by two people - one for each of the dual timelines. The main narrator who tells the present story does voices and accents of characters, which I think they managed quite well - it’s always a worry that when voice acting different genders it’s going to be cringy or distract from the story but I think this was done well considering all the different accents required.

The book is about a civil servant who finds out that she’s going to be looking after a ‘refugee’ and living with them whilst they get settled into the country. But the ministry informs her that she’s going to be paired with a man from the 1800s who was saved from death and brought to the current day. His name is Commander Graham Gore (a real person c.1809-c.1847), who was on the doomed Franklin Expedition. This was a book that really got in my head and I couldn't stop thinking about after. I loved the romance aspects even though I’m not a huge romance fan, and it was such an enjoyable book to read. My only criticism is that the ending seemed really rushed - so much happened in a short space that I had to read it twice and I wished the book had just been longer and fully fleshed out the ending!

Thought-provoking and engaging, with a killer 'are we the bad guys' moment and a twist I didn't see coming. I came for the romance and stayed for the physics and ethics of time travel

i am baffled by the hype surrounding this book; not only has been blurbed by several 'big' authors, but it's apparently it's also slated for adaptation into a BBC drama. i have questions...

to use an overused term, this book is mid. inoffensive, if you will. it's doing nothing new, and it is written in the kind of witty British voice that seems derivative of authors like Diana Wynne Jones, possibly even Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. nor does it possess Zen Cho's delightful satire. the storytelling here feels lacklustre & vanilla.
.
Right from the outset, the book's attempts at self-awareness about the tropes of its genre ("anyone who has ever watched a film with time-travel, or read a book with 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 <i>can</i> it work?") backfire, as we are offered a generic explanation of time-travel along the lines of "[D]on'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".

what made absolutely 0 sense to me was not so much the time-travelling and the lack of explanation around it, but the identity of these 'expats' (would they really 'rescue' someone who was in the midst of a war? surely they would consider them unsuitable, or too much of a risk, given that they are bound to have some form of ptsd and might believe that they have been captured by the 'enemy), and their 'bridges'.
we're led to believe that their bridges undergo careful selection and multiple interviews, yet our protagonist seems entirely ill-suited for the task at hand. it would have been more logical for someone with an understanding of the expat's era to care for them. moreover, the notion that these time expats wouldn't be institutionalized but instead released to live with their bridges seems implausible.
and would they really place them in London? surely it would have made more sense to find safehouses in the countryside, as opposed to smackbam in the middle of modernity.
despite the considerable resources invested in extracting them, they're entrusted to a single individual who promptly forgets their surveillance duties, allowing them to wander the city alone?

it's nonsensical. while i'm willing to suspend disbelief regarding time travel, if i'm to buy into this 'ministry', it should feel less slapdash.

i skimmed ahead and saw how the romance subplot would unfold...if anything the romance made the story all the banal. why can't we have significant non-romantic relationships between male and female main characters? must it inevitably result in a romance, even here? the optics were dubious, akin to a therapist and their patient embarking on a romantic relationship.

given all the buzz around this novel, i recognise that i am an outlier and chances are that it will be a hit for most readers (i just happen not be one of them). i recommend giving this novel a shot and forming your own opinion. YMMV and all that jazz.

There is so much to like about this book. In particular, there’s Kaliane Bradley’s prose which is absolutely fizzing with wit. She has a real gift for snapshot similes. They’re all over the prose:

“He got out of the car and looked up and down the street with the weariness of a man who has travelled across the continent and has yet to find his hotel.”

“That night, I slept with unpleasant lightness, my brain balanced on unconsciousness like an insect’s foot on the meniscus of a pond.”

She also has a real gift for juxtaposing ideas. The premise of the book is that a government department has plucked a handful of people out of the past and is studying them to see what effect time travel has upon them. The narrator who has been assigned as a minder to one of the time travellers is of British Cambodian heritage (like the author) and continually views the situation and behaviour of her charge through the prism of dislocation and exile. It’s a comparison that yields all kinds of interesting insights.

However, Bradley’s writing is more than a little opaque. Indeed, as the novel went on, I found it harder and harder to understand what was going on until, by the end, I was frankly lost. I don’t think it was all my fault. The closing stages of the book felt full of slightly frantic explanation that didn’t really explain things at all.

Nonetheless, this is an exciting debut from a writer I really want to read more of.

I really liked this audiobook, right from the very first page it was interesting, the concept of being a refugee in time is just really unique and the narration was great.

It’s sci-fi and time travel so it definitely made my head ache at times but also my heart, It has really well done romance.

I did not see the answers coming until they unravelled and I really enjoyed exploring the ambiguity of a lot of history and how we see things.

There was also lot of charm and humour especially from Gore, I loved his character. All the characters that were meant to be liked are and easily so. They’re well developed and the plot is very much charchter driven. It was a complicated story but written in a way that was perfect to get your head around and held my interest, I’m not a huge romance reader but I loved watching the main relationship of the plot develop.

Paced well, it explored the themes of colonialism and identity while also being a slow burn thought provoking romance. A truly unique book.

Thank you to NetGalley and the author for an ARC copy of this title.

The premise of there being a ministry to support refugees throughout time had me hooked from the off. It gave off Harry Potter and The Time Traveller’s Wife vibes. I’d be interested in a series off of the back of this as I thoroughly enjoyed it!

The characters and their relationships are layered and complicated. I absolutely adored Margaret and her character also reminded me of the play Top Girls by Carl Churchill.

The book explores really important themes in a smart way by placing characters of different attitudes and eras all together in a current context. Key to the narrative are attitudes to race, equality and diversity and many more.

It had a good pace to its plot with well placed humour and realism in a well developed story and ended in a hopeful way.

"The Ministry of Time" is a fascinating blend of genres that takes you on a journey through history, love, and the complexities of human connection. The story interweaves elements of science fiction, comedy, and romance to tell a story that is both engaging and thought-provoking.
Throughout the novel, you'd be hard pressed not to like the majority of the so-called "expats", special shout out to Margaret who sounds like an absolute hoot. The slower paced start of the story allows plenty of time to really get to know and love the expats before the faster-paced second half comes crashing down with its twists and turns that bring a much darker side of the project to the surface.
This book raises questions about whether love can overcome the barriers of time and the inherent challenges of bridging vastly different worlds. I haven't read anything like it and wouldn't hesitate to recommend far and wide.

What an exciting and original story this is! I have read some reviews on Goodreads from people accusing the writer of plagiarism of a Spanish TV series also called 'The Ministry of Time'. I haven't seen this TV series, however I was intrigued to find out more about it so I read about it a little. The two things this book and the TV series seem to have in common are the title and the concept of time travel - let's face it, both of those are common themes of many, many books and films alike.

In addition, this book is not even a time travel story per se. Sure, there are characters in here that, at the time the story starts, have arrived into the present from other eras - but this is it, we don't actually see anyone travelling to different times within the defined storylines. What we do see is an engaging narrative with several different twists and turns, well portrayed and quirky protagonists and a solid writing style. I have thoroughly enjoyed my listening experience of the audiobook and I look forward to seeing what the author will write next.

Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest and impartial review.

The book really isn't for me...way too little time-travel, way too much romance. It's well-written, and, as a romance book, I could go for it. However, not being into the genre, it's not for me.
The narrators did a goood job.
5 stars because it's not the book, it's me.

The Ministry of Time has as it's central story a very novel concept. The taking of several 'expats' from different timelines in history where they had died and bringing them to the present time for repatriation into the 21st century. Here they are given a mentor or 'bridge ' to acclimatise them to everyday life. Being a sucker for any time travel/slip/jump story I jumped at the chance to read this book as I loved the idea. The story concentrates mainly on the relationship between expat Commander Graham Gore (a real person lost in an Arctic expedition in 1847-8) and his Bridge. As one would expect the novel touches on many issues whilst acclimatising the expats and this is done in a sensitive fashion. The characters are well written and easily visualised. The narrative is complicated, fascinating and imaginative. I really didn't know what was going to happen next right to the very last page. An excellent book I'm happy to recommend for all fans of time travel or simply a very good read.
I listened to the audiobook of The Ministry of Time. Two narrators were used. A male voice read the introduction to each chapter which had Commander Gore in the Arctic and a female voice the role of the narrator/Bridge. I felt this was very effective and enhanced my enjoyment of the book.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read an advance copy. All opinions are my own.

I can understand why there is so much prepublication hype about this one and I think it will be huge, widely read and so so many readers will love this.
However, I didn't love yet but certainly enjoyed most of it. I can suspend reality with fiction but I felt like I was plunged into this story so much so that I went back to check I hadn't missed a couple of chapters at the beginning. The pace is quick at the beginning, there is a brief explainer into this concept of time travel and away the book goes. Once I understand the concept I decided to go with it and this was an original read, I liked the writing and how the author mixes in so many type of genres. This was part historical fiction, part spy thriller/ adventure, a dash of dystopian but at its heart its a love story. I really liked the main characters but their romance , I didn't connect with it, it felt a bit telling not showing for the first half of the build up of their relationship but eventually I got on board with them being together although I didn't love the details of same,.

I thought the final quarter of the book was its strongest and I was invested at that point, a satisfying conclusion and listening to the acknowledgements at the end gave me a greater appreciation of the book, as a whole. An original story, well written and will appeal to so many readers.. I really liked the narration on this one and to be honest I am not sure would I have continued reading if I was reading this one but the audiobook was great.

This was more its not you, its me. Romance isn't my favourite, type of fiction, less sex more spys and this could have been a 4 star for me but a steady 3 star read, glad I read it, know it will be successful.

Wishing the author much luck and looking forward to more from her.

I really did not know what to expect when I went into this story. And after hearing it, I still don't quite know.

Specific personalities from the past chosen to be saved from their fate and taken into the present, and the people there to guide them, as friends, as housemates, as supervisors. To help them adapt, accept, and learn.

What starts as a somewhat slow romance-ish thing soon turns into a romantic drama, with all the issues that come with lovers from different times, where one is keeping more secrets than they let on. And has significantly more power.
The romance felt a little...odd. At times I felt the main character had more chemistry with some of the female characters than the male lead. Far more. Maybe the story would have been better if a lesbian relationship had formed, especially since one of the characters I'm talking about is already lesbian. But then again, I always think that lgbt-leads would be more interesting than straight-leads.
What felt especially off-putting were the sex scenes. Even though they were not super explicit, they were decently so, and...
I don't quite know whether it was the way it was read, or the way it was written that made it feel so weird.
I kind of liked the way that the author avoided repetitiveness sometimes by not repeating the action that was already talked about outside of conversation, but letting the reactions of the characters speak.
And what I really liked was the whole concept of the story. Maybe it would have been better entirely without a romance - just the sci-fi time travel drama and intrigue.
Even though on the scientific layer the whole concept falls a little bit flat.

All in all, the book was good. The narrator did a good job, even though sometimes the voice she gave the male lead made me think he was a like 80 year old man, his old-timey speech not helping there (even though the latter makes sense since he is indeed from the past), which made the romance feel even weirder.

Also
when a gun is pointed at you, "Oh" is maybe not the best response xD
But this spoke for the main character if anything :P