The Ministry of Time

March 1, 2024
A time-toying spy romance that's truly a thriller. In the author's note following the moving conclusion of her gripping, gleefully delicious debut novel, Bradley explains how she gathered historical facts about Lt. Graham Gore, a real-life Victorian naval officer and polar explorer, then "extrapolated a great deal" about him to come up with one of her main characters, a curly-haired, chain-smoking, devastatingly charming dreamboat who has been transported through time. Having also found inspiration in the sole extant daguerreotype of Gore, showing him to have been "a very attractive man," Bradley wrote the earliest draft of the book for a cluster of friends who were similarly passionate about polar explorers. Her finished novel--taut, artfully unspooled, and vividly written--retains the kind of insouciant joy and intimacy you might expect from a book with those origins. It's also breathtakingly sexy. The time-toggling plot focuses on the plight of a British civil servant who takes a high-paying job on a secret mission, working as a "bridge" to help time-traveling "expats" resettle in 21st-century London--and who falls hard for her charge, the aforementioned Commander Gore. Drama, intrigue, and romance ensue. And while this quasi-futuristic tale of time and tenderness never seems to take itself too seriously, it also offers a meaningful, nuanced perspective on the challenges we face, the choices we make, and the way we live and love today. This rip-roaring romp pivots between past and present and posits the future-altering power of love, hope, and forgiveness.

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March 11, 2024
British Cambodian writer Bradley’s clever debut features time travel, romance, cloak-and-dagger plotting, and a critique of the British Empire. The unnamed narrator, who works as a translator for Britain’s Ministry of Defence sometime in the near future, is selected by the government to aid a newly formed agency to process time travelers from the past. Her assigned “expat” is real-life polar explorer Lt. Graham Gore, who has arrived in the future sometime before his death during the ill-fated 1845 Franklin expedition, a mind-bender Bradley heads off at the pass (“Anyone who has ever watched a film with time-travel... will know that the moment you start to think about the physics of it, you are in a crock of shit”). The narrator, whose mother was a Cambodian refugee, feels a kinship with Gore’s sense of disorientation. The roguishly handsome naval officer lives with her as part of the terms of the assignment, and her account of their burgeoning mutual attraction is interspersed with episodes from Gore’s disastrous journey to the Arctic. A thriller-like scenario regarding mortal threats to the narrator and Gore feels secondary; more fruitful are Bradley’s depictions of the ways in which time travelers react to modern nightclubs, sexual freedoms, and the news that the empire has “collapse.” It’s a sly and ingenious vehicle for commentary on the disruptions and displacements of modern life.

April 1, 2024
Graham Gore, a nineteenth-century British arctic explorer, becomes, much to his surprise, an expat in our era as part of a time-travel experiment being conducted by the government. While Graham is the sole traveler from the nineteenth century, companions from other times join in. The woman narrator in Bradley's lively firecracker of a debut is an English Cambodian (like the author herself) civil servant assigned to be Graham's "bridge," someone who acclimatizes an expat to their new situation. The travelers must learn about plastics, social media, and a dizzying set of changes in their landscape. Graham has an easier time of it than the rest; he is also luckier than them as the sinister reasons for the experiment become more apparent. Tongue firmly in cheek, Bradley presents a fun ride punctuated with moments of deep pathos. The listlessness that the expats' experience might not be that different from that of asylum seekers in new countries. Bradley writes, ""The rhythms of loss and asylum, exodus and loneliness, roll like floods across history." It's a point well made in any era.

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Starred review from September 20, 2024

DEBUT A paper pusher for the British government is assigned to an experimental time travel ministry helping an "expat" stolen from the past adjust to modern life. She's assigned to bridge this knowledge gap as a roommate to Graham Gore from the doomed Franklin Expedition, performing both friendship and surveillance for a year. She keeps him at arm's length to avoid acting on her instant attraction. But issues in the ministry--including overly interested spy handlers, double agents, and future tech--force her and Gore closer. But their connection might also destroy their future. This melancholic tale reads like a dryly millennial take on classical Greek tragedy. Alternately bitter, absurdist, and hopeful, the story is at once a slow-burn romance, a spy thriller, and a tightly focused character study. It also examines obsession, flattening and replaying the past, and the desire to be right overwhelming the opportunity to do good. How can history change, Bradley asks, if people barely tolerate one another's individual pasts? VERDICT Bittersweet, tender, and ruthless, Bradley's captivating debut examines the personal frictions between people, between global and personal understanding, and within one's self.--Katherine Sleyko

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