The Ministry of Time

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ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF SUMMER 2024 
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 
A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK 
ONE OF THE WASHINGTON POST'S BEST BOOKS OF THE SUMMER

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.

"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

“Flawlessly paced and brazenly genre mixing, Kaliane Bradley’s debut is at once a spy thriller, a time-travel tale, a romance, and a story with room to consider the climate crisis, imperialism, grief, and the weight of history… Fun, funny, sharp, and ridiculously, compulsively readable, Bradley’s novel is also poignant and wise, a thriller full of questions about how we live both now and within the great span of human history.”—Esquire

“[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

Kaliane Bradley is a British-Cambodian writer and editor based in London. Her short fiction has appeared in Somesuch Stories, The Willowherb Review, Electric Literature, Catapult, and Extra Teeth, among others. She was the winner of the 2022 Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize and the 2022 V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize.