Read With Us Selection
Spring 2024

The Ministry of Time
by Kaliane Bradley

352 pages
Published May 7, 2024 by Simon & Schuster

Chosen as a Good Morning America book club pick, May 2024

“For a book that could also be easily described as witty, sexy escapist fiction, The Ministry of Time packs a substantial punch … Kaliane Bradley proves that it’s possible to address imperialism, the scourge of bureaucracy, cross-cultural conflict and the paranoia inherent in a surveillance state through her utterly entertaining novel … An edgy, playful and provocative book that’s likely to be the most thought-provoking romance novel of the summer.”
—Lauren LeBlanc, Los Angeles Times review

Join Us For the Book Discussion on Zoom

Tuesday, September 17, 2024, 7:00 pm Eastern time
Questions will also be posted on our blogs: Highly Reasonable, Carole Knits, Dancing At the Edge.

Please RSVP to receive Zoom link information by emailing Kym Mulhern (email in sidebar) by September 16, 2024. Thank you.

“Everything that has ever been could have been prevented, and none of it was. The only thing you can mend is the future.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

Brief Synopsis

(from Trails End Bookstore)

In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and is, shortly afterward, told what project she’ll be working on. A recently established government ministry is gathering “expats” from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible—for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time.

She is tasked with working as a “bridge”: living with, assisting, and monitoring the expat known as “1847” or Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to be living with an unmarried woman who regularly shows her calves, surrounded by outlandish concepts such as “washing machines,” “Spotify,” and “the collapse of the British Empire.” But with an appetite for discovery, a seven-a-day cigarette habit, and the support of a charming and chaotic cast of fellow expats, he soon adjusts.

Over the next year, what the bridge initially thought would be, at best, a horrifically uncomfortable roommate dynamic, evolves into something much deeper. By the time the true shape of the Ministry’s project comes to light, the bridge has fallen haphazardly, fervently in love, with consequences she never could have imagined. Forced to confront the choices that brought them together, the bridge must finally reckon with how—and whether she believes—what she does next can change the future.

An exquisitely original and feverishly fun fusion of genres and ideas, The Ministry of Time asks: What does it mean to defy history, when history is living in your house? Kaliane Bradley’s answer is a blazing, unforgettable testament to what we owe each other in a changing world.

Information About the Author

Photo by Robin Christian

(from Simon & Schuster)

Kaliane Bradley is a British-Cambodian writer and editor based in London. Her short fiction has appeared in Somesuch Stories, The Willowherb Review, Electric Literature, Catapult, and Extra Teeth, among others. She was the winner of the 2022 Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize and the 2022 V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize.

How do you pronounce the author’s name . . . Kaliane Bradley?
Kaliane = Cull-yan (which means “darling” in Cambodian)

Book Reviews

Author Interviews

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Supplemental Resources

Story Summary

Summary of The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley: A Detailed Synopsis from New Book Recommendations

Characters in The Ministry of Time

Narrator (unnamed)

The Expats:

  • Commander Graham Gore (1847): Royal navy commander
  • Captain Arthur Reginald-Smyth (1916): man extracted from the Battle of the Somme, WWI, gay or bisexual
  • Margaret Kemble (1665): woman extracted from Great Plague of London, gay
  • Lieutenant Thomas Cardingham (1645): man extracted from Battle of Naseby
  • Anne Spencer (1793): woman extracted from French Revolution, stops showing up on scanners in the present

The Bridges:

  • Narrator (Graham)
  • Simellia (Arthur)
  • Ralph (Margaret)
  • Ivan (Thomas) – rarely mentioned
  • Ed (Anne) – rarely mentioned

Additional Characters

  • Adela: Vice Secretary of the Ministry of Time, future narrator
  • Quentin: narrator’s “handler”, removed from his position
  • Sadavir: handler
  • The Brigadier: spy from the future
  • Salese: spy from the future

Members of the Franklin Expedition

  • Captain Fitzjames: captain of Erebus, co-leader of expedition after Sir John Franklin died
  • Captain Crozier: captain of Terror, co-leader of expedition after Sir John Franklin died
  • Stanley: ship’s surgeon
  • Goodsire: ship’s assistant surgeon and Graham’s friend

Commander Graham Gore and The Lost Franklin Expedition

Author Kaliane Bradley based her character Commander Graham Gore (1847) on a real-life, historical figure. You can read more about him on his Wikipedia pager, here.

If you’d like to lerant more about the (very real) Lost Franklin Expedition, you can read a fascinating and relatively brief summary here.