Loved this book! So many twists and turns, such great character development. I was totally invested by chapter two and couldn’t put it down!

This is an early contender for 2024 "Book of the Year'. I loved it. An easy handsell and a totally satisfying read.

Wow! I a fantastic take on the time travel genre- time travel is there but is it safe?
I loved the concept of removing people from history who were about to die anyway and seeing what bringing them to the future would do. The characters chosen were well varied and portrayed excellently through their interactions with each other and their bridges.
No aspect of the fallout was missing (for me anyway!) including whether the removal of the people from their own time might have triggered events that would not otherwise have happened.
The book has romance, humour, passion and gently touches on cultural shock and isolation that is echoed in real life immigration situations.
A great read!

I really enjoyed this book. I love anything with a time-travel theme, and this was such a clever idea that I was engrossed from the beginning. Great characters, and an appealing story. I will certainly be recommending this book.

This pulled me out of a reading slump. I adored the voice - and the characters. (Need more Margaret please!)

It’s a lovely slow burn but I stayed because I was connecting individually with both main characters too - and the cast of characters around them.

It’s always difficult to keep plot threads together when it comes to time travel but I think this does a great job of balancing it all and the characters are always what pull me in - if rendered well enough - as they are here.

Humorous, poignant, wise and original. I can’t wait to get a finished copy.

The Ministry of Time combines time travel, real-life historical references, romance, and humour with themes of race, gender and sexuality. I found the attempt to combine so many genres and themes to be a touch ambitious; for me, it resulted in a book with a confused identity.

I enjoyed the humorous interactions between the 'ex-pats' and 'bridges', and I found the interspersed historical accounts of Gore's time with the ill-fated Erebus expedition interesting and genuinely moving. However, I found the romance between Gore and his bridge to be rather jarring, and the sex scenes slightly ridiculous.

The sci-fi elements seemed underdeveloped and the storyline rushed - I never fully grasped why there were time travellers from the future and what was actually going on.

Thank you to NetGalley, the publishers and the author for an e-ARC to read and review.

In a near future UK, the Ministry has discovered a time travel door. Five “expats” from different time periods are brought through and each is assigned a “bridge” to help them acclimatise to the modern day. We primarily follow the Expat 1847 and his Bridge. First for the things I liked: I laughed out loud at these people from last eras discovering the joys of Spotify and the tube . I loved Arthur and Maggie’s characters. If you’ve ever watched Ghosts the BBC tv show, then this feels quite similar to that. As for the cons: the actual time travel aspects felt a bit wishy washy for me. I didn’t really grasp the “hereness” and “thereness” concept and I think more development in this area would’ve improved my overall reading experience.
That being said, if you like Ghosts, Spy movies and Dr Who then you’ll probably want to check this out.

No negaré que leí este libro impulsada por la polémica que se desató en redes cuando se anunció tanto su publicación como su adaptación televisiva. Lo cierto es que a pesar de lo desafortunado del nombre, el libro no se parece a la serie española homónima por lo que al menos parte de esas críticas eran infundadas. Nada de viajar al pasado para ir cambiando cosas y mantener la línea temporal, toda la novela se narra en el mismo futuro cercano asediado por el cambio climático y los refugiados. Otro cantar es que ojalá se pareciera, porque la obra de Kaliane Bradley es muy mejorable en diversos aspectos.


La idea de la que parte la novela es que tras “descubrir” (en una forma muy en línea con la tendencia británica a quedarse con lo que se encuentra) una máquina para viajar en el tiempo, el gobierno británico decide extraer a cuatro personajes del pasado cuando están a punto de morir y traerlos al presente para ver si sobreviven, si influyen en el continuo espacio-temporal y en general, para experimentar con ellos. Estos cuatro personajes tendrán asignado un enlace, un bridge encargado de ir enseñándoles el mundo actual y algo de historia, pero de una manera sosegada y medida para no provocar crisis.

Aunque los viajeros en el tiempo como digo son cuatro, el libro está muy centrado en solo uno de ellos, un explorador del ártico llamada Graham Gore, del que se nota a la legua que la propia Kaliane Bradley está enamorada. Todo el libro gira alrededor de la relación de Gore con su bridge y aunque en principio podríamos pensar en la novela como una comedia romántica con los típicos malentendidos de una pareja que se atrae pero que no se conoce, la autora no deja de lado las conspiraciones y las luchas de poder.

Por desgracia, el conjunto no acaba de cuajar. La trama amorosa es tan previsible que clama al cielo y en cuanto a los viajes en el tiempo, brillan por su ausencia. Hay una parte dedicada al espionaje y al robo de secretos, pero no os engaño si os digo que se basa más en la inocencia y en la inutilidad de los funcionarios asignados al departamento correspondiente que a la perseverancia y la astucia de los saboteadores.

No negaré que el choque cultural entre los cuatro expatriados (por no decirle extiempados), sobre todo al principio del libro, tiene cierta gracia, como por ejemplo la difícil asimilación de la caída del Imperio Británico, la liberación de la mujer y muchas otras temáticas, pero este recurso del chiste facilón se desgasta con demasiada rapidez como para aguantar toda la novela.

A expensas de conocer cómo será la adaptación, he de decir que la novela basa más su fama en la polémica creada que en sus virtudes intrínsecas, pues no deja de ser una más del montón.

This book is based on a clever idea and the first half is very entertainng. The second half felt a bit like wading through fog as I was never entirely clear why the people had been brough forward from the past to the present. Having been a long time fan of the tale of Erebus and Terror's fated voyage I liked the characterisation of Gore very much. He was the highlight of the book for me. A clever idea that didn't quite hit the spot. For me at least. Thank you to NetGalley, the publishers and the author for an e-ARC to read and review.

Loved this novel! Starting from a quiet point with a government employee promoted to a new role won a special project, this thriller /sci fi/romance careens on at speed. A handful of soon to die people are extracted from the past and brought to live in the present, and each is assigned a handler, or bridge, to help them in their temporal refuge. A love story and call to action, completely contemporary and over far too soon. No spoilers!

The Ministry of Time is a funny, thoughtful and thought provoking novel by Kaliane Bradley. The themes of refugees, time travel, race, global warming are given a new twist and shaken with a little 1984 Orwellian magic to make a gripping, strange, put it down and you’ll start missing it like the emptiness of a once full house novel. Government secrecy and hidden agendas interweave with a story of two characters with seemingly nothing in common forging a friendship. There is hinted at corruption with as much about what isn’t revealed as is revealed in this unique book

LOVED this fantastic debut! ]

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for an advanced reading copy.

Slow to start, the first half of the book plodded along. The second half picked up but I've not had chance to finish yet.

This book is a cocktail of comedy, romance, science fiction, with a literary cherry on top. From the first few pages I was hooked, and I flew through this book like I haven't in a long time! The prose is beautiful and funny, and considering this is a debut I'm really impressed.
The ending got a bit too sci-fi thriller for me unfortunately, otherwise this would have been a 5-star read for sure.

This is a great idea for a book. Pull people from the past into modern times and see what happens.
However, for me it didn't quite work. I found it quite slow and a bit confusing. To be fair, a lot of time travel stories are confusing. It seemed like in this case the start was too slow and the end too quick.
I couldn't quite work it out.

The premise of the book is very interesting: a government ministry have discovered a door that can bring people forward in time. They have carefully selected subjects and given them ‘bridges’ - people to live with them and help them to navigate the modern world. I found the pace of the first part of the book a little slow and the developing relationship didn’t really convince me. I enjoyed the last part of the book much more after a twist in the narrative and a change to more of a spy novel with time travel complications. I think others may enjoy this book more than I did, Thanks to Netgalley for an ARC.

The Ministry of Time

For the first quarter of The Ministry of Time, I thought it was the greatest book I'd read all year. The premise was fantastic: steal some dead people from history, bring them into the twenty first century and see how they adjust. I did pause for a minute, as I often do with time travel, to see if it made internal sense. There were some issues, as there often are, but I decided to put them aside and just enjoy the story.

The writing is really, really good ("As the Arctic wind bites at his hands and feet, his thoughts slop against his skull", "Most friendship quartets don't function in squares but in lines"). The semantic discussion of expats vs. refugees, in the context of time vs. space, was right up my alley. I really enjoyed getting a nineteenth century perspective on our own era, especially since most of the focus was on societal changes, rather than obvious "big deals" like the invention of the internet or the cellphone ("There's no space here. How can you breathe? Is all of England like this? The entire world?"). I also loved the flashback bits describing some of Gore's experiences on the Arctic expedition. I find historical fiction the easiest way for me to learn about history and then also retain what I've learned, and even though Bradley filled in the gaps, the difficulties and dilemmas Arctic expeditions of the time faced, described in those passages, were both true and fascinating. I never realized ships could be literally trapped in frozen seas.

At some point, however, I began to feel like there was something I should be getting but wasn't. I think this feeling was intentional, since the book often hints at future events, and is written as a retrospection on something that has already happened, but rather than feeling like an unraveling mystery, I just stopped understanding what was going on.

The subtle discussions around race and power were so subtle they were actually too vague to follow, while simultaneously trying to function as major plot motives, so I lost the "why" of the plot, which made the "what" significantly less interesting.

The main conflict in the story came from a seemingly random direction, so much so that I almost considered going back rereading half of the book to understand how I'd missed it. That's when I lost the "how" as well.

Overall, while the writing continued to shine, the story progressively made less and less sense, and according to the end there was supposed to be some important statement about fascism, power and oppression somewhere along the way, but I have no idea when we were supposed to realize that.

I do see a future in which I re-read The Ministry of Time and see if hindsight changes the picture, and I'll definitely follow Bradley's future work, but I'm also thoroughly confused.

I have a weakness for time travel stories especially the ones where different eras clash with other eras that are totally different from the other ones so I was sold to the premise of this book instantly and I have to say it's really good and I enjoyed reading it but some parts I found more slow than the others. Still, seeing how a person from 19th century or 17th century might deal with this era it's just something I need to read. Maybe it had some parts that I wanted more from but maybe these are just my expectations, overall it's a good story.

I had really high hopes for this book, but unfortunately it slightly missed the mark for me - that's not to say I didn't enjoy it, but I'd perhaps set my expectations too high!

I loved the concept - a character focussed sci-fi about a group of people from various time periods who are transported to a near future. They are each allocated a 'bridge' who is tasked with living with, assisting and monitoring them. The story focusses on one bridge in particular and her expat known as "1847". I really enjoyed how 1847 explored life in the future - figuring out big things like relationships and how religion exists in the modern world, but also other much smaller things that we can take for granted in contemporary life, like Spotify and cycling.

I wasn't, however, quite convinced by the evolution of the relationship between 1847 and his bridge. I also found the first half of the book too slow and unnecessarily wordy (the second half certainly picked up pace), and the plot was a bit meandering for me. Overall, a good read with an interesting concept.

I'd give this 3.5 over 4, but I don't want to mark it down purely because it's a bit too sci fi for my liking. But that's not the author, or the books fault!
I could see this as a film quite easily and an enjoyable one too. I really like the way it is written, the author has a lovely way of ensuring that you want to keep turning the page. The right amount of detail without being overbearing!
If you like Sci-Fi, romance in unexpected tales and history; this book is for you!

No spoilers in my reviews, just read it!