Overview

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 ""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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9781668045145

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Reviews

"""Holy smokes, this novel is an absolute cut above! Kaliane Bradley leaps into a storytelling league of her own. This book is deadly serious speculative fiction, but it is also one of the funniest books I've read in years. It's exciting, surprising, intellectually provocative, weird, radical, tender, and moving. I missed it when I was away from it. I will hurry to re-read it. Make room on your bookshelves for a new classic."" --Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers ""An outrageously brilliant debut. . . This is already the best new book I will have read next year."" --Eleanor Catton, author of Birnam Wood ""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, New York Times bestselling author of The Whalebone Theatre ""Kaliane Bradley writes with the maximalist confidence of P. G. Wodehouse, but also with the page-turning pining of Sally Rooney. It's thought-provoking and horribly clever--but it also made me laugh out loud."" --Alice Winn, author of In Memoriam ""A fantastic debut: conceptually brilliant, really funny, genuinely moving, written in the most exquisite language and with a wonderful articulation of the knotty complexities of a mixed-race heritage."" --Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime ""Sly and illusionless in its use of history, lovely in its sentences, warm--no, hotter than that--in its characterisation, devastating in its denouement. A weird, kind, clever, heartsick little time bomb of a book."" --Francis Spufford, author of Golden Hill ""What a stunning and remarkable wonder! What if time travel was run by a bureaucracy? . . . There's something here for everyone - world history, side-splitting humour, lusty tension, brilliant prose, and characters to root for desperately. Bradley describes someone in the novel as being ""sweaty and vibeless"", but I want to counter with this: The Ministry of Time is the most vibe-forward book I have ever read."" - Vanessa Chan, author of The Storm We Made"

Author Information

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.

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