Reviewed by Rebecca Foster
Kaliane Bradley has had a big year. The British-Cambodian author’s debut novel, The Ministry of Time, was longlisted for a British Book Award, the Jhalak Prize, and the Women’s Prize for Fiction; and shortlisted for an even more startling range of prizes: the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction, the Climate Fiction Prize, the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award, a Hugo Award, and the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize. It won a Goodreads Choice Award in the Science Fiction category, too. And that’s not to mention its place on Barack Obama’s summer reading list, which may also be to thank for its New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller status.
All I can do is add my voice to the praise: this was one of my most anticipated releases of 2024 and lived up to my hopes, becoming one of my favourite reads of the year. I rightly had in mind that it would be a zany time-travel romance involving a modern-day civil servant falling in love with her charge, a real-life Victorian polar explorer. The blurb had me expecting something light and one-dimensional, so it was a pleasant surprise to find that this nuanced novel alternately goes along with and flouts the tropes of spy fiction and science fiction, and makes clever observations about how we frame stories of empire and progress.
The unnamed first-person narrator is, like the author, a young British-Cambodian woman. She is blasé about her government work in languages and relishes the chance to do something a bit different. After a rigorous set of interviews for the Ministry’s mysterious new project, she is hired as a “bridge” helping to resettle one of five “expatriates” from history in near- future London. Her expat is “1847,” 38-year-old Commander Graham Gore, rescued before his death on Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated Arctic expedition.
Two of the other expats, Arthur aka “1916” and seventeenth-century nonconformist Margaret Kemble (both queer), become Gore’s close friends. It’s a delight to watch these characters take up new vocabulary and technology and handpick the things they appreciate about popular culture. There are some hilarious scenes of the gang all together, particularly those involving music: Arthur and Graham put on a ‘disco’, the narrator teaches them all to do the electric slide before a clubbing outing, and they have a go on a theremin.
Gore lives in the narrator’s flat while she oversees his adjustment. At times he is like her “overgrown son,” testing the boundaries and expressing knee-jerk disapproval of things he doesn’t understand. Gradually their bizarre housemate situation turns into an odd-couple romance. “He was an anachronism, a puzzle, a piss-take, a problem, but he was, above all things, a charming man. … I was concussed with love for him. I bent my head to the cudgel.” Although this feels like wish-fulfilment (imagine choosing a historical figure you find vaguely hot, bringing them back to life, and then giving your fictional stand-in a chance with them), Bradley doesn’t completely gloss over the difficulties their backgrounds and mores would cause. Most noteworthy is his exoticization of her as a mixed-race woman. Occasional passages in archaic font introducing vignettes from Gore’s time in the Arctic suggest that his reaction to the narrator may be informed by a pivotal encounter he had with a bereaved Inuit woman. The expats undergo intense sensitivity training, but the imperial mindset is hard to root out, and even the narrator, whose mother was a refugee from the Khmer Rouge, isn’t sure she’s always getting it right when it comes to racism and assimilation.
Bradley’s descriptive prose is a highlight (“he looked oddly formal, as if he was the sole person in serif font”; “A great graphite pencil inscribed the diagonal journey of water on the air”), memorable but never too quirky just for the sake of it. At a certain point, plot starts to take over and pushes aside the quiet playfulness of the culture shock scenes. I did miss the innocent joy, but that’s Bradley’s point: mess around with the past and grave consequences are bound to follow. We learn that the Ministry has a double agent, that there are visitors from later centuries as well as previous ones, and that the narrator’s own future is at stake.
Maybe because I don’t read hard science fiction, it didn’t bother me that the explanations and world-building are a little bit thin here. You just have to suspend disbelief at the start and then go with it. The result is a witty, sexy, off-kilter gem. I haven’t had so much sheer fun with a book since Curtis Sittenfeld’s Romantic Comedy, and I will be keeping a keen eye out for whatever Bradley writes next. If you missed The Ministry of Time when it came out in hardback, now is your time to catch up on one of the books everyone is rightly talking about.
Rebecca Foster is a freelance proofreader and literary critic who recently served as a
judge for the McKitterick Prize (for debut novels by authors over age 40). Her writing
is most often found on her blog, Bookish Beck.
Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time (Sceptre, 2025). 978-1399726368, 368 pp.,
paperback.
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