Very pleased to be able to read the hottest-tipped book of 2024! A clever, seductive, genre-busting, sci-fli (cli-fi?) romance with history, toxicity, racism and humanity at its core. But no matter what terms are thrown at it, it remains a pacy story with lots of heart (or maybe not?). The true nature of Gore keeps the reader guessing until the end (and if you can refrain from shouting at the main character then well done you!). I can't wait to see what other novels Kaliane writes. Reminded me a bit of The Psychology of Time Travel meets 1984 - both Orwell and Newman!

Woah this absolutely blew me away. This was so amazing for a debut novel, I loved everything about this, the, plot, the characters, the great twists. I couldn't put this down, everything about this was so unique and I was desperate to see what happened next. I highly recommend to anyone who enjoys sci-fi and thriller and I can't wait to see what Kaliane Bradley comes up with next.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6241294252

Something about the style of this meant it took me a while to get into it/pick up what was going on, but once I did, it was great. A really clever premise, and as the book wore on I came to care a lot about the main characters. Refreshingly different from anything else I've read recently.

Thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the ARC.

Contemporary Science Fiction with a wonderful writing style. Contains the necessary problems and paradoxes associated with time travel, written about by some of the great sci-fi writers of the past. This chronicle also presents and develops some unique characters in which the reader must surely become invested.

Less speed than many time travel thrillers but nonetheless compelling reading.

Finally, if you are a fan of the descriptive narrative, full of similes and metaphors, then dive right in. You will be in heaven!

This book presents a clever and gripping narrative that compelled me to finish it in a mere 1.5 days, a testament to its engaging plot. The prose is marked by witty word plays, offering a nuanced exploration of live cultures, both past and present, and the challenges of understanding them across time.

The absence of the main character's name is a curious choice, though it adds an air of mystery. While it initially bothered me, the gradual revelation that the story may be a personal memoir adds a layer of intrigue to the narrative.

One aspect that stood out was the main character's use of overly complicated words. As a native English speaker with a less extensive vocabulary, I found her language choices, while perhaps reflecting the main character’s background in languages, to be less enjoyable. It made the reading experience less fun for me, as I would have preferred simpler explanations.

The time-travel concept is intriguing, cleverly utilized not only to depict past-to-present cultural shock but also as a tool for the main character's self-reflection. As someone with a similar background of not living in their country of origin, I found relatable elements in her predicament.

Despite my enjoyment, the plot and pacing felt somewhat imbalanced. The slow start, understandable for character development, only truly lifts off around 70%, transitioning abruptly into a more sci-fi thriller. The multitude of tropes explored, including self-acceptance, identity, and cultural issues, felt ambitious but occasionally led to information overload.

In conclusion, this book offers an enjoyable experience, seamlessly blending self-analysis with sci-fi elements. While the balance between genres could be refined, the narrative's potential as a movie, particularly within the sci-fi thriller genre, is evident. A recommended read for those seeking a mix of thought-provoking concepts and gripping storytelling.

Wow! It's hard to believe that this is a debut novel. Read The Ministry of Time if you like exceptional writing, smouldering romance and a crafted plot. A cast of intriguing characters are pulled from various points in the past; their assimilation to modern life (the book is set in the near future) is guided by ministry employees called "bridges" but we don't really know why any of this is happening and the sinister Ministry behind the time travel experiment creates an element of mystery to the story. It is a thriller, there are hints of a dystopian future but there are also many comedy moments, often due to culture shock. I especially liked Margaret's comments on our modern world.
I look forward to Kaliane Bradley's next book.

The Ministry of Time blends time travel, romance, mystery, and comedy seamlessly together. The story revolves around a government ministry gathering "expats" from across history to establish the possibility of time travel. The main unnamed character is a civil servant who works as a bridge to guide her assigned expat, Commander Graham Gore, through the unfamiliar century they have arrived in. It soon becomes clear that the Ministry’s project isn’t all that it seems to be….

This is a really great book that will appeal to all readers, not just those interested in time travel reads. I anticipate that this will be one of the biggies of 2024.

I really don't know what to say. I normally read thrillers but something about this book really intrigued me.

I loved it. I LOVED IT.

I laughed, I cried, I cried some more. I will be recommending this to absolutely everyone.

The Ministry Of Time by Kailane Bradley:

This book had been tipped for success for some time, it’s was in all the ‘best books of 2024’ lists, the international rights have been sold and the TV adaptation is already in progress. I’m here to tell you that the hype is/was/will be real.

In a near future/becoming dystopian Britain, time travel is discovered. People are saved from a variety of fates and named ‘expats’. They are assigned a ‘bridge’, someone to acclimatise those saved to 21st century life and the novel contains the relationship between a British-Cambodian civil servant and Graham Gore, a 19th Arctic explorer.

Ok, that’s a vague and allusive stub of the narrative, but I’m not the kind of blogger who’ll let slip the book’s delicious secrets. One twist can be guessed immediately, but that’s the main strand of the narrative. The others, you won’t see coming a mile off. It’s a book that is part science-fiction, part thriller, part-deadpan comedy. Its roots are in flash fiction (Gore did actually exist), but that’s not to dismiss the effortless comic skill of someone adapting to a pre-apocalyptic future. I loved the other characters too, especially Margaret the proto-lesbian saved from the plague, let loose in hipster London.

The marketing material compares it to Time Traveller’s Wife or Cloud Atlas and they’re two of my favourite books. I think that does the author a great disservice, as The Ministry Of Time is quite unlike anything you’ll read this year or any year. It’s published by Hodder And Stoughton on May 14th and I thank them for a preview copy.

The Ministry of Time has such a unique premise, and the initial setup was wonderful. The first few pages setting the scene and explaining how the expats were selected was gripping and held such promise, however, I found my interest waned as the story progressed

It's extremely well-written and there were moments I thoroughly enjoyed, including laugh out loud moments with the expats accumulation to modern life, but ultimately I felt like there was a limited plot until the end

I also couldn't get on board with the romantic element of this book. I liked Gore, but the romance felt uncomfortable to me as it felt developed from close proximity and obsession, rather than genuine feelings. It was also clear that they were not equals or on the same page. Our nameless female was keeping secrets and Gore was only just learning about modern dating/relationships and putting aside his personal values to try to adjust

I do think this is an incredibly well-crafted book and it's brilliant in many ways, but I was just left wanting more from the plot and would have liked a more developed romance

Thank you NetGalley and publishers for approving my request to read this book!

A devastatingly lovely and brilliant high-concept page turner, The Ministry of Time sees a real-life sailor pitched headfirst into the modern day thanks to a time-travelling branch of the government. Anchored by a young civil servant, the two form a romance and a found family, and then deal with the ramifications of this. Beautiful and heartfelt, heartbreaking and hopeful all at once, The Ministry of Time is a wholly unique, star-bright novel that asks if love can transcend time and space.

Thanks to Hodder & Stoughton and NetGalley for the ARC.
I had high hopes of this book but was sadly a little disappointed. The premise of the story - Govt sponsored time-travel, pan-temporal romance, etc, was intriguing but it’s execution was, well, more than a little dull. Possibly the author was trying to do too much (time-travel, love story, plus themes of climate and societal collapse, racism, colonialism and more) with the result that none of it was done particularly well, but I found I was skim reading chunks of the novel because it dragged so much. Some of the secondary characters such as Maggie, were much more interesting than the main characters, and I just didn’t believe the main love story as neither character had any characteristics that seemed particularly loveable, and there was little build up of chemistry. Sadly, in my opinion Jasper Fforde (The Eyre Affair) and Jodi Taylor (first few volumes of the Chronicles of St Mary’s) do this kind of thing better.

Astonishingly good! Rarely have I read anything so darn funny yet so powerful, emotionally charged and haunting.

It is sometime in the near future and ‘the Ministry’ have found a way to harness time and started a project to bring ‘expats’ from various historical eras into the present day. A lowly civil servant gets a role as a ‘bridge’ which involves looking after one of the expats and ensuring that they adjust to modern life. Her assigned expat is Commander Graham Gore, who died on Franklin’s doomed Arctic expedition. The relationship between Gore and his bridge gradually, awkwardly develops while simultaneously it is becoming apparent that the Ministry’s project isn’t all that it seems.

I laughed and I cried and I fell in love with Gore (I challenge anyone not to!). I cannot recommend this book more!

Thanks ever so much to @sceptrebooks for sharing this title with me on @netgalley!

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley.

Immediately after having finished reading it, I gave this book a 4/5. Upon reflecting, 24 hours or so later, I have downgraded it to 3/5 and I am ready to explain myself.

On paper, this seemed right up my street. The hype surrounding it was borderline obsessive and, if nothing else, it made me realise the power and influence of marketing campaigns. I was delighted to see it appear on NetGalley and I requested it straight away.

The initial pages seemed to do the trick: I find that time travel, as a concept, is often hard to depict accurately in literature without sounding clunky (cinema has the obvious advantage here), but I am willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. I can suspend my disbelief, yes I can! After all, other works of soft science-fiction such as Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Sower introduce time travel with no explanation of the mechanics behind it and whilst I do wish we could get more of a detailed explanation, I can let it rest. Time travel: yay from me.

So here we have this Commander Graham Gore (decidedly unattractive in my opinion, if the photo included in at the end of the book is anything to go by - yes, I'm very superficial) who has been brought back to life and catapulted directly into modern-day London. Wacky adventures ensure... only they're not always that amusing and can drag on at times. Gore's getting to grips with the modern world and navigating his growing romantic feelings for his 'Bridge' take up the bulk of this novel and that's fine... but then the last 10-20% of the book arrives and you're back in soft sci-fi land, with added unconvincing action scenes. It... doesn't quite work for me. The final reveal is slightly confusing and the ending felt rushed in general. Too much is revealed in very little space and the tone doesn't match up with the 200 or so pages that came before it.

Nevertheless, I loved Bradley's writing style throughout: it was quirky without feeling jarring or try-hard and I found myself identifying a lot with the narrator (I'm the sort of person who would love a chicken bag). The time travel element drew me in initially and the romantic elements kept me going, but then the ending was a bit of a let down. I look forward to reading whatever she puts out next and I'm sure this will do numbers once it's out, especially in the superior format: paperback.

3/5

The Ministry of Time is a novel that combines time travel, romance, and a strange government department, as five 'expats' from earlier times are brought to the near future. Our unnamed narrator suddenly finds herself with a new job working as a 'bridge' for one of the people brought from the past using time travel, to see how time travel affects them. Her charge is Commander Graham Gore, who died on a doomed Arctic expedition in 1847, and he has to adjust to the modern day, so she works hard to follow orders and help Gore, whilst becoming deeply intrigued by him. However, the mystery surrounding the point of the project and the difficulties of being from such different times threaten her work and her connection with Gore.

I could tell this is going to be a hyped book and wanted to read it to see what it is like, especially as the summary makes it sound pretty genre-defying. Told from the perspective of a woman with a Cambodian mother and British father, you immediately dive into a narrative engaging with displacement, refugees, and power structures as you learn about what her job is and see it get underway. As well as this, the book doesn't shy away from colonialism as something that is going to have an impact when bringing people from the past to the present day (well, a near-future with a worsening climate crisis). There's a lot of big ideas in the book and some of the best bits are the thorny ways of navigating these things.

At the same time, the book has a romance at its centre, meaning that it focuses on its two leads and their relationship, which is a slow burn one complicated by the governmental espionage and time travel elements. Both the narrator and Gore get a decent amount of characterisation and I can imagine people who got really into The Terror will like this kind of Arctic explorer romance. The ending, without wanting to give away too much, leaves a kind of ambiguous confusion about their relationship, which is an interesting choice and one I imagine people will like or hate.

There's some great side characters, particularly First World War soldier Arthur and 17th century plague escapee Margaret whose respective sexualities mean that the 21st century offers them a space for more freedom than the past. However, the book doesn't really explore how this impacts either of them, because it is from the POV of a character who isn't really bothered about that, or even Gore's own reference to having sex with men, and it just seems like the book had these really interesting elements and then did nothing with them (even down to the fact that it almost seemed like the narrator might be bisexual, or actually talk to Arthur about their shared attraction to Gore).

This book is a lot of things at once, and sometimes that's great—combining time travel, romance, and shady governments with some big questions about people and belonging—but sometimes it undercuts itself by only being one of the things at a time, which can be jarring. The writing style at times is grating, whether it is occasional turns of phrase that just sound like tweets or the random ways in which the historical characters speak, but it is also very readable and there's plenty of fun banter for people who enjoy that. The Ministry of Time is a gripping read with a perhaps too quick ending and a tendency to not always following through on its promises.

An imaginative and well executed story of time travel and history and the planet.

Time travel enables the powers that be to bring forward from the past - individuals who were about to die anyway. ‘Bridges’ are appointed to help them adjust to contemporary life. The stories of these individuals and their bridges are a fascinating insight into both the past and the present.

I thought this was an imaginative and enjoyable story.

An experiment is underway. The Ministry have a time door, and they use it to “grab” people from the past. Their “Expats” are a varied bunch, and once given the medical all clear each one is placed with a minder, called a Bridge, and put into individual homes throughout London. The housemates get to know each other, learning from both sides. During the course of the story, life stories unfurl and the acclimatisation of the Expats to their new lives are monitored and recorded.

I love time travel stories and thought this one started extremely well. Unfortunately it did lose its way and the Boys Own action did nothing for me. I found the ending to be a bit of a let down and wanted more. Less confusion would have helped. It needed more time travel and less derring-do.

A well written, thought provoking story that held great premise, but from the hype I expected more. I do think the book will sell well, and as a debut it was interesting and I look forward to more from this author, just this one missed the mark for me.

2.5*

Thank you NetGalley and Hodder & Stoughton.

This book has a bit of everything. Time travel, Arctic exploration, romance, government leaks and climate change.
Novels and films about time travel usually bore me as they get so complex with so many possibilities and never knowing when dead is dead. However I thought that it was well handled and believable here although it did get a bit more complex towards the end but that was nicely countered with a big surprise. Much is written about the problems they have adapting to life in a different century as well as the guilt at having left others behind to their fates.
Only five characters were rescued from the past so it was quite easy to remember them all and get a good feel of their personalities. They are all monitored by an assigned Bridge and our narrator has been allocated the attractive Graham Gore and these two are the focus of the book. Commander Gore had been on the ill fated Franklin expedition trying to find the North West Passage and although I have seen a TV series about this I never got tired of reading more detail about it.
It was beautifully written and there was enough of a thriller element to the story to keep me wanting to avidly read on.
Thanks to NetGalley and Hodder & Stoughton for the ARC

I was intrigued by the description of this book but it didn't live up to the hype.
Normally a book will grip me so much that I can't put it down and I will finish it in a day or two.
Not with this book. It is a very slow burner that took me a week to finish. I didn't really like the main character
and found it so slow and boring for around three quarters of the book. Also didn't like all the bad language.

I absolutely loved this book. What a fantastic simple concept: time travel has been discovered, but what happens when someone is moved in time? Is it healthy, might it kill them? A few select people - about to die anyway - are fetched from history and assigned “bridges” to be their human companions and teach them about their new, contemporary lives. That in itself is a lovely idea. But the writing lifts it far beyond a simple good idea. Themes of isolation, immigration, trauma (inherited and first hand) and love weave through the book. I could not put it down. Superb.