The Ministry of Time
Kailiane Bradley
I'm not sure if we ever learn the name of the first-person narrator of The Ministry of Time. By the end of the book we know a lot about her, and I had the impression that her name had been mentioned at some point, but I think I was mistaken about that. She is a mixed-race young woman, the child of an English diplomat and a Cambodian woman. She is, when the story begins, employed in the Languages department of the Ministry of Defence. She has just applied for a new job doing she knows not what, as that information is classified. All she knows for sure is that the salary is three times what she's been making.
She gets the job, working for the Ministry of Time as a "bridge." It transpires that the government has time travel, and that they have snatched five people from past centuries into twenty-first century England. Each of these "expats," as they are euphemistically called, is to live with a modern-day companion, the bridge, who will help them navigate and learn about this brave new world. Our narrator is the bridge for one Graham Gore -- a real person, as it turns out -- a nineteenth century explorer who died along with many others during the failed Franklin polar expedition.
Gore and our narrator eventually fall in love. Shakespeare's dictum "The course of true love never did run smooth" holds in this case. Love mixed with time travel and with secret government agencies turns out to be a messy business. And yet, withal, a very good story.
The Ministry of Time is not very science fictiony for most of its length. Time travel just serves as a way to throw a nineteenth century Englishman and a twenty-first century English-Cambodian woman together, along with a few other weirdos from past times. And that's fine. It does, towards the end, become more like hard time-travel fiction. That part also works pretty well, I think.
I read The Ministry of Time because it is a finalist for the 2025 best novel Hugo, and I am grateful to the Hugos for pointing me at it. Here's the full list of finalists, with my ratings (except for Alien Clay, which I have yet to read). Unless Alien Clay surprises me, it will be between this book and Robert Jackson Bennett's The Tainted Cup. I suspect I'll end up voting for The Ministry of Time. It is, I believe, Kaliane Bradley's debut novel, and that impresses me.
☆☆☆☆☆ (not yet read) Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky
★★★★★ The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
★★★☆☆ Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky
★★★☆☆ Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell
★★★★☆ A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher
★★★★★ The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett