Funny, sweet, sad, confusing in the way only time travel can be. The first half where they're getting acclimated to the new era is funny, and the second half where the love story, heartbreak, and discovery of future events takes place sends you reeling a bit. ( )

I had high hopes for this one. It checked so many boxes of things I love. But in the end the characters left me cold. I felt like it couldn’t decide if it was trying to be whimsical love story via the movie Kate & Leopold or a more serious time travel novel like Dark Matter. It kept switching gears, and so neither story felt as compelling as I wanted it to. Not awful, just disappointing because of my high expectations. ( )

An experiment in time travel has led to a disparate group of expats who have been transported to the present by a mysterious Ministry. Each is assigned a 'bridge' who will live with them for a year, monitor them and assimilate them into modern life. One of the expats is Graham Gore who disappeared in 1847 on a failed Arctic expedition. As he and his bridge grow closer, the experiment starts to have problems.
I found this quite an odd novel to read. Being someone who utterly hates Sci-Fi I found great stretches of the story difficult to engage with, however the slow-burn love story and the insights into assimilation from refugees and 'expats' were great. It's a bit of curate's egg, fantastic in parts but actually the key plot points I really disliked, however there's no doubting Bradley's talent ( )

The Publisher Says: 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.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I know how petty and spoiled I'm going to sound in this review, but I can't, in good conscience, ignore this extremely promising debut novel. I'm a complete sucker for time-travel novels and stories, and all the weirdness that accompanies the (incorrect, in my opinion) History-changing antics of time travelers. (I think there are many worlds in the multiverse.) The notion here presented of making use of the lives of those who died too soon for Other Ends is one with a lot of appeal to me.

And yet this is a five-star idea in a four-star book. I love the idea! I like the execution because it's not fussy, doesn't cram in irrelevancies but *does* offer squads and fleets of enriching details, bothe about the past and the story-present, just a bit down our own road. So what's wrong?

She makes the spy story an excuse to tell this fundamentally romantic story, not this idea to propel a spy story. The way it's resolved is good just not great, and that's down to the wrong-endedness of the grasp. Nameless Narratrix is, it's absurdly evident from the get-go, going to fall in love with her new "expat" (coy bureaucratese for "kidnapped time-traveling hostage") and they are going to Do the Deed. I'm on record as not liking heterosex in my life, no matter where it comes from, so this was never going to work for me. But after thinking a lot about this book and its wonderful humor, its inventive take on the purposes of time travel, and its very well-limned characters, I realized I'd be just as tetchy if Nameless had been a man bedding a man the way god intended.

The problem for me is that I think the romantic plot is just too similar to the squads and fleets of inferior iterations of Outlander that litter the romance-reader's landscape. Why do more of the same? Well, in this case, because 1) it sells, and b) it's vastly...enormously...better-done than anything else in its competition.

But here's whiny little me, moaning "just leave it out!" as Nameless and her "expat" have headboard-smashing sex. Y'all are voting with your wallets, the book's a hit and rightly so! But it isn't the book I wanted.

Hence four, not five, stars. And my shamefaced admission that this is NOT the review that this book merited. ( )

The Ministry of Time is a soft sci-fi romance between a 10-minutes-from-now modern woman and a 19th century naval officer. It is also the story of a planet in climate crisis, and it is about empire and generational trauma, and it is about breaking free of the story laid out for you. I found many parts of it compelling: the romance in particular worked for me, and I also thought a lot of the dialogue and character beats were quite funny. The book is structured with interludes after each chapter into the historical events the male main character, Commander Gore of the HMS Erebus, experienced as a part of Franklin’s lost expedition. I have more than zero knowledge of that particular incident as a fan of the TV show The Terror (much like the author herself), and so these interludes were of questionable utility for me. Once I read the author’s note and understood she included them partly out of deference to people who are not already familiar they made a little more sense.
Towards the end of the novel, as we careen towards a conclusion, I started to lose the plot a little – I understand everything that happened, I just am not sure I felt satisfied by the final act. I’m picky about endings though, especially for stories I enjoy, so I think that may be a personal thing. Overall this is an exciting debut from someone I share more than a few interests with, so I’m curious to see more from her in the future. ( )