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.

I liked this book so much, I even read the Afterword and the Acknowledgements. I also devoured it in two days, which is the kind of thing I might do during the long summer holiday, but not over a weekend.
Due to be published on 7 May 2024, this first novel from Kaliane Bradley seems to have been inspired by the television adaptation of Dan Simmons’ The Terror, which I reviewed a while back. My biggest complaint about that TV series (and many other, similar, narratives) concerned the lack of women. Well, here Kariane Bradley offers a riposte: what if you took one of those hardy, desperate, frost-damaged men, and hoiked him off in a time machine to the ~21st century? And gave him a woman as a handler?
That Afterword gives a hint of this genesis: conversations with friends about all those lost men, the what ifs and so on.
Somehow, humanity has discovered time travel. As in most time travel narratives, we wave our hands as to the mechanism. Experimenting with what happens if they pull people out of time, they grab five people who were certain to die anyway and give them a year to adjust—or not. So we’ve got a couple of people from the sixteenth century, a traumatised soldier from the Somme, a woman from the 18th century, and Lieutenant Graham Gore from Franklin’s lost Arctic expedition.
What happens, how the time travelers adjust, or not, what the Ministry is up to, forms the basis of this narrative. The tone is elegiac: the narrator hints from the beginning that events take a turn, directly addressing the text receiver and expressing the idea that narrative itself is a form of time travel. She’s talking about Genette’s narrative hypostasis: there’s the subsequent narrator, positioned in space and time after the events she is recounting; and there’s the narrator-as-a-character in the story, an isotope who is moving through time, approaching but never quite becoming the person telling the story.
It’s not all doom and gloom of course. There’s light comedy in the culture shock aspects as well as poignancy. There’s a little bit of romance, some mystery: all the things.
Most of all this is entertaining and deftly written, an excellent debut novel.
This is a review of an ARC from Hodder and NetGalley.

I was so excited to read "A Ministry of Time" by Kaliane Bradley and I cetrtainly was not let down! I am a massive Whovian and huge fan of Tom Holt and Douglas Adams so this synopsis was right up my street! Time Travel, Thriller, Urban Fantasy, Romance. Seriously! I need a sit down!

Our protagonist is a civil servant and offered the promotoin of a lifetime, but there is a catch... the travel involved is not to distant lands, but to other era's. Acclimatising expats from different eras is not the easiest task, especially when contemporary sensibilities can make a grown man blush! However, Commander Gore adapts and adjusts with bloody minded determintation and a slow burn romance ensues. However, the course does not run smooth and there are certain "considerations" to take into account

The supporting cast is reminiscent of the Chaos in the last section of Bill & Teds Excellent Adventure, when they gather icons from history for their book report, but take the excellence of Bill and Teds and multiply in tenfold and you will still not be close to the awesome that this book personifies

So much fun and exquisitely written! I really enjoyed this book and I am looking forward to reading more from this author

Thank you to Netgalley, Hodder & Stoughton and the author Kaliane Bradley for this exceptional arc! My review is left voluntarily and all opinions are my own

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It sucked me in right from the start. I liked the characters. It wasn't action packed but did not drag at all. I did not see the ending coming at all. Not sure you could call it a twist but it was definitely not where I thought it was going.

The Ministry of Time starts as one thing and becomes another, appropriately enough for a sci-fi/political thriller/romance/comedy novel!
I absolutely loved this rollercoaster of a tale, which careens around mind-blowing bends until you have to go make a cup of tea just to process the excitement.
Not since Heathcliff has a sexy, brooding, Gothic hero captivated me so much- I quite preferred him to everyone else although they are a compelling cast. I’m looking forward to seeing what this author does next.

Anyone who has kept an eye on my reading choices over the last few years,will know that I do love a good time travel novel, so I grabbed this one when I saw it on Netgalley UK
In this novel, the government has discovered a way of travelling through time and has chosen to visit a number of times in the past and rescue individuals from what look like certain death. These time travellers include a woman who should’ve died of plague, and a member of a doomed polar expedition who would have died of starvation, stranded in the ice when his ship could not escape.
We primarily follow the story of the sailor, and the woman who is assigned to be his handler or “bridge “ The story starts soon after the prime travellers have moved to our current time and follows these people as , stranded in a different time zone, they try make sense of modern life.
The author clearly has a interest in the way, spoken language changes over time, and in different situations, I particularly enjoyed the discussions of language and the difference in different time periods. I also thought the language that the narrator uses when she had a bad cold was quite amusing .
The story moves quite fast once the initial set up is over and there’s been quite exciting sections towards the end. The narrator and her time traveller are avoiding people who mean to do them harm .
The book is primarily and. action or story based novel there is some character, description and development. I personally would’ve liked more.
There is a sweet love story between two of the characters and a beautifully written sex experience, which I enjoyed
The novel is witty, intelligent and energetic, lots of things to think about is you read.
The majority of the novel is set in London and there’s a distinctly British feel about it.
As the novel progresses, we learn more about the polar Explorer and his past history. There are sections in different type face which takes the form of a story about his doomed polar expedition. In the acknowledgements at the end of the novel, you discovered that this person is a real character From history. Personally I found the sections a little bit divorced from the rest of the novel and they’re interesting well written. I felt that Story could probably done without as much information and historical detail. The interest to me in reading this book was the difference. The people were finding between now, and then in normal life experiences

I read early copy of the novel on NetGalley UK. The book is published in the UK on the 14th of May 2024 by Hodder and Stoughton, Sceptre.
This review will appear on NetGalley, UK, Goodreads and my book, blog, bionic, SarahS books.wordpress.com
After publication, the review will also appear on Amazon, UK

Three and a half stars.

So difficult to review this because there was so much to like and so much I didn't really understand.

Our protagonist, whose name we never really find out, is an English civil servant. Her mother fled from the Khmer Rouge atrocities in Cambodia to England and is married to an Englishman. Our protagonist is recruited into a top-secret refugee scheme, but instead of using her language skills to help dispossessed refugees from other countries she is helping time-travellers to assimilate into modern life. The Ministry has discovered that it can transport people who died but their bodies were never found into the present day and there is a varied group of people ranging from the 1600s to WW1 who have been brought out of their own time. Each time-traveller is assigned a 'bridge' and she has been assigned Commander Graham Gore, an arctic explorer who died on Sir John Franklin's doomed expedition to the Arctic in 1847 - just as we don't know our protagonists name, the travellers are more often referred to by their year of extraction than their names.

As some of the travellers start to suffer mental health issues caused by their involuntary extraction, the stark realisation that all their friends and family are long-dead, and the stresses of adapting to modern life, can an early Victorian naval explorer and a modern Englishwoman find romance?

The modern-day narrative is also mixed with short passages from Graham's arctic expedition. Alongside a faintly sinister Big Brother oversight of the travellers and the minutiae of their everyday lives is a discourse on 'otherness' and racism.

I enjoyed this but I'm not sure what it was trying to be. Maybe I'm not clever enough to understand, and TBH the longer I think about it the more questions I have - maybe that's the sign of a good book.

I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

I'm very sorry to say this wasn't for me. I really liked the first 30% - it truly is a brilliant idea, absolutely genius. This is definitely going to sell ten billion copies / be a popular book among people who only read 3-4 books per year (sorry to sound like a horrible bitchy snob when I say that... but you know it's true). This is a good read for fans of Naomi Alderman's <i>The Power</i>.

I don't like it when books become very ACTION-Y i.e. the dialogue gets filled with lines like "You're in danger, do you understand?", people are running, screaming, shots are going off, loooooooong speeches are being made... not for me. I think <i>Sea of Tranquility</i> is a much more beautiful exploration of time travel and a much more CHARACTER-BASED story... the characters here imo got thrown under the bus of plot and that was just not for me. Maybe I should have read this book on an airplane. It's also worth saying that because this book has been so INCREDIBLY HYPED that I am likely judging it too harshly. This is why I don't like reading debuts until a few years later!!! So that I can be more objective!!! But I was hungry for something immersive and entertaining, a la <i>Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow</i> and I thought this book would do the trick. <i>Birnam Wood</i> is a novel that I think does a much better job of being VERY PLOT-Y, VERY DRAMATIC, VERY ENTERTAINING, and yet is also substantial and character-based. I wonder if 3rd person rather than 1st person would have been a better choice for this.

I do think this book engages with some really thoughtful stuff and is well-executed in parts - I really liked the parallel between time travellers and refugees / immigrants, and I liked all the moments that engaged seriously with the legacy of the British Empire. These parts of the book are definitely not dumb and fluffy. And Margaret is a fantastic character, arguably much more interesting that Gore (I had the feeling that the author really, really enjoyed writing the Margaret bits). Overall I liked the human bits of the novel but I didn't like it once the book became ACTION MOVIE, but many readers will not have a problem with that.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

A real page turner.
Into a rather horrifying vision of the future of the world, and the UK in particular, several expats — refugees from previous centuries — arrive. All have been brought through a time portal, having apparently died in their era.
Each expat is given a 'bridge', someone from the 'Ministry' who is there to guide them through this unfamiliar century they have arrived in.
Among the horrors of the new era, relationships develop and there are charming descriptions of the 17th century, 19th century and early 20th century expats' encounters with the vagaries of modern life.
Some really funny moments amid a charming story that also relays an important message about what we are doing to the planet.
Thoroughly enjoyable.

This is a lovely read. The time travel part, particularly towards the end, is rather incomprehensible, but it’s still five stars for me - the writing is gorgeous and the characters really enjoyable. I love time travelling books, but in some ways this is almost more of a historical novel about the polar expedition than time travel as a narrowly understood scifi genre. If that’s what you’re after, I can see that you may be disappointed. However, if you want something engaging, well written and with great characters, it’s definitely a five star read.

This was an amazing read, I devoured it in one day. I love the whole concept of time travel so I knew this book would be up my street, but I wasn't expecting it to be so moving - it's less about the mechanics of how it all works and more about the impact on the travellers themselves and those assigned by a mysterious government department to be their "handlers". As the various relationships developed I found myself really invested in the characters. A really different and beautifully written meditation on what unites and divides us as human beings.

An incredible book. I’m stuck on it, having finished it and immediately wanting to re-read it. An interesting premise that is approached from a fun angle and filled out by loveable characters. Dialogue and narrative are excellent, and it was truly a joy to read. There are layers to it and I want to dig right in and live among them. I cannot recommend this book enough, it’ll be going right to my top favourites.

Many many thanks for NetGalley for early access in return for an honest review. This was a diamond read.