I love that the literary mainstream has adopted time travel; it’s no longer just the province of genre writers. Yes, it means that some authors reheat old ideas, but for the most part, I’ve been impressed with how these “outsiders” have added several coats of paint to a well-worn trope. The Ministry of Time doesn’t do anything outrageously innovative with time travel as a concept, but it does use the conventions of the genre to test assumptions around race and class. 

Set in the near future, the UK Government has stumbled across time travel. To test the feasibility and safety of the technology, they pluck five people from their time-streams, people who went missing, presumed dead. One of those is Graham Gore, a member of the Franklin expedition (which you’ll know all about if you’ve read Dan Simmon’s The Terror or watched the TV adaptation). To ease Gore’s transition into our world, he’s assigned a “bridge”, our unnamed narrator who took the job because she thought she was dealing with refugees (her mother fled Cambodia), not a temporally displaced naval officer. Our narrator not only comes to know (and yes, fall in love with) Gore, but she also forges a deep relationship with two other ex-pats, Margaret from the Great Plague of London and Arthur from the Battle of the Somme.

It’s the characters that make this novel, especially the expats. Partly, it’s the culture shock (the expat’s reaction to technology is charming); partly, it is a newfound freedom to express their sexuality (Margaret is gay, she’s straight on Insta and Tinder), but mostly it’s that Graham, Arthur and Margaret are really lovely people. I also enjoyed how Bradley uses the temporal gulf between the narrator and Gore to interrogate their assumptions about race and identity. It awakens a side of our narrator, her Cambodian heritage, which she thought was dormant.

On the flip side, the conspiracy, spy-thriller stuff that drives the plot isn’t as interesting as the character work, but it includes a few nice twists. This is a wonderful debut; it’s worth your time.