Review: The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
- Tom Odlin
- Jun 10
- 2 min read
Updated: Jul 5
A melancholy, clever, deeply human time-travel novel about bureaucracy, romance, and the people history forgets.
If you’ve ever wished The Time Traveler’s Wife was funnier or Black Mirror a bit more romantic, The Ministry of Time might be precisely what you’re looking for.
Kaliane Bradley’s debut is a genre-warping, high-concept, slow-burn love story set inside a deeply British government pilot program that recruits “expats” from across history (actual people extracted from the past) and tries to integrate them into modern society.
Our narrator is unnamed. She’s a civil servant, fluent in sarcasm and quietly self-loathing. Her assignment: to live with and monitor a 19th-century polar explorer plucked from near-certain death and brought into 21st-century London. Complications ensue.
There’s a lot of walking. There’s a lot of silence. There’s a lot of yearning.
It’s weird. It’s smart. It’s very, very good.
🚀 The Setup
The unnamed narrator is sharp, detached, and slightly imploding. Her job? Host Commander Graham Gore—yes, the real historical figure—from the doomed Franklin expedition, now very much alive and very confused by Tesco.
The setup is absurd, but Bradley plays it straight. This isn’t slapstick; it’s painfully plausible. What happens when a man from 1847 has to register with a GP? Or learn about bisexuality? Or find out the monarchy still exists?
The book leans on the tension between past and present, the unbridgeable gaps between people, and the slow, strange intimacy that forms between two people who shouldn’t be able to understand each other at all.
✨ What’s Good
The prose is exceptional. It’s dry, precise, and emotionally loaded in all the best ways. Bradley has a gift for saying one thing and letting another bleed through beneath it.
The humour is subtle and often cutting. There’s a scene involving a support group for historical expats that’s both hilarious and heartbreaking.
The central relationship works. Gore is dignified, stubborn, and oddly gentle. The narrator is brittle, brilliant, and broken. The romance is slow and adult and full of restraint—which makes it hit all the harder when it finally cracks open.
There are also political undercurrents—about colonialism, history, queerness, and erasure—that deepen the emotional weight without overwhelming the narrative.
⚠️ What’s Slightly Less Good
It’s a slow burn. If you’re looking for fast-paced sci-fi hijinks, you won’t find them here. The plot is quiet, and the tension builds gradually. Some may find it too restrained.
The narrator’s opacity can be frustrating. She withholds a lot from others and the reader. It fits the character, but there are moments you wish she’d let you in just a bit more.
The ending, while thematically satisfying, may feel abrupt or underwhelming for those expecting a more substantial payoff.
🧹 Final Thoughts
The Ministry of Time is a rare thing: a literary time-travel romance that’s funny, moving, and profoundly, precisely strange. It’s less about the mechanics of time travel than about the people lost inside it.
It’s romantic but never sentimental. It’s political but never preachy. And it’s one of the best debuts in recent memory.
If you like your science fiction quiet, your romance aching, and your bureaucracy existential, this one’s for you.
Recommended if you like:
Long walks. Emotional repression. Unexpected tears.
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