Breakaway Books

Authored by Kaliane Bradley; Published May 2024; Science fiction

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️🏖️

The first thing that struck me about The Ministry of Time was that it made me laugh. Introduce figures from across the past several centuries into the modern-day U.K., and surely hijinks will ensue. The humor got me right from the start.

The vivid way the author describes Commander Gore, plucked from the past and shoved into the present in a government experiment of sorts, captured me right from the start. (He is, incidentally, a real person, his memory borrowed for this story) He is the consummate male lead: charming, stoic, and not quite heroic enough to be annoying. He leads a group of “expatriates” from across the timeline into their brave new world, trying to take care of his out-of-time fellows and keep them together.

The camaraderie of this group has to be one of the most heart-warming elements of the novel. They have nothing in common except for the fact that they were robbed from their own time—but somehow, they empathize and care for each other. 

But the novel isn’t all comedy and camaraderie; time travel comes with its share of loss and death. The central struggle of the narrator, a member of the Ministry of Time who has been assigned to help the Commander adjust to modern time, is the gradual recognition that she is participating in something horrible as it’s happening, even if only as a minor civil servant. How much do we blind ourselves for our own comfort, our own convenience? How much do we pretend that we don’t know? How can the heroine, from a family of Cambodian refugees who fled an oppressive state, so easily become a cog in another?

Dark and mysterious, the bureaucracy of the Ministry lends a thrilling, suspenseful aspect to the story, twists and turns throughout time. The violence of the state is never taken lightly, but treated with the horror that it deserves, in spite of the light tone throughout much of the novel. Overall, it made the novel thought-provoking, if shot through with comedy and romance.

I’ve never read a take on time travel like this one, but I’ll certainly be recommending it.