In the not too distant future, a civil servant in the UK is offered a complicated, top secret job. The British government has recently figured out time travel, and are gathering people from different moments throughout history and bringing them to the present to see what happens. The government chooses only people who would have died anyway, due to sickness or other circumstances, and pairs each “ex-pat” with a contemporary “bridge,” to rehabilitate them into their future (the book’s present). It’s part science experiment, part social experiment, part secret operation.
Our narrator is paired with Graham Gore, the real life Commander on Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 arctic expedition, who, as far as history is concerned, died in 1847. While Graham struggles with modern devices, modern hemlines, and the fact that everyone he ever knew died over a hundred years ago, the narrator is grappling with her own existential crisis; what is her role in this government experiment, and what should it be? The two have to learn to live and work together, in a sort of combination of odd couple, enemies to lovers, spy and handler/scientist and experiment situation.
The Ministry of Time is not only a brilliantly plotted story of history, obsession, espionage, modernity, climate crisis, love, and, of course, time travel, but it is beautifully written at the sentence level. Author Kaliane Bradley’s words often made me stop to reread, no easy feat considering how eager I was to plow ahead and unravel this complicated, tender, tale.
-Hannah, Programs and Outreach
