The Ministry of Time (2024)
Why this one?
I’m finally getting around to checking out a few of the books on the 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist, before I read the shortlist in full when it’s announced. This one has been so widely talked about that its announcement on the longlist gave me an excuse to belatedly catch up and see what the fuss was about.
Kaliane Mong Huxham Bradley (1989- ; active 2022- ) was born in Walthamstow, London to a British father and a Cambodian Khmer mother. Her family moved to Essex, to the east of London, when Bradley was 10. She studied English literature at University College London (UCL). She worked for Granta as an editor and later commissioning editor, as well as contributing theatre and dance related content to various British newspapers and magazine. In 2022, she won the Harper’s Bazaar Short Story competition for “Golden Years” and the VS Pritchett Short Story Prize for “Doggerland”.
The Ministry of Time (2024) is her debut novel and attracted a considerable scramble from publishers. Prior to its publication it secured translation deals for 13 territories and was subject to an adaptation auction between 21 production companies, with a BBC adaptation announced in February 2025. At the helm will be playwright and screenwriter Alice Burch, who co-wrote the BBC’s adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People. As well as the Women’s Prize, it has received numerous award listings, including for the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize and the inaugural Climate Fiction Prize.
Thoughts, etc.
The Ministry of Time is a science fiction romance (with distinct thriller tropes on top of that), focusing on an unnamed civil servant working for the titular government agency in a near-future version of London. She is serving as a ‘bridge’ to one of an initial batch of time travellers, who have been ‘rescued’ from various significant points in history at the moment of their historical deaths. Her ‘expat’ (the name the government gives to the travelers, politically chosen in favour of ‘refugees’) is Graham Gore, a ship commander on board Sir John Franklin’s lost expedition to the Arctic in the 1840s.
The novel began life as a series of short vignettes that Bradley wrote to amuse herself and her friends, after having seen Gore’s appearance in AMC’s series The Terror, as a minor character. These stories began as humerous snippets, imagining Gore interacting with the modern world. As an origin story, it makes a lot of sense. While a lot of additional plot and character architecture has gone into developing this into a novel, the book is at its strongest when it sticks to this central principle. The narrator begins by effectively telling us not to worry about the mechanics of time travel and just go with the flow (‘hard’ sci-fi this is definitely not), and that’s really the best spirit with which to approach much of The Ministry of Time.
Essentially we find Graham coming to terms with all aspects of life in the twenty-first century. He grapples with modern technology (loves Spotify, but text messages less so), and gamely tries to adapt to modern cultural mores and attitudes. The potential for conflict is set up here as his handler is (like Bradley herself) of mixed British/Cambodian heritage who generally ‘passes’ as white/European, whereas Graham comes from an ostensibly less progressive era when it comes to attitudes to race (and indeed worked on a slave ship). However, for the most part, the book is happier in general to sideline these bigger issues in favour of enjoyable larking about and a developing romance.
That’s not to say it’s not a book with worthwhile messages, though. Alongside the reasonably well-handled romance and increasingly thriller-like escapades, there are some weighty subjects being addressed in here. On the race note, we find Graham ultimately settling into a ‘decent chap’ caricature who may say the odd cringeworthy anachronism but by and large is wordly and capable of adapting to his new reality, and this is relatively smartly played off in the contrast with how the narrator finds herself treated by her contemporaries, with perpetual micro-aggressions from her colleagues and even peers. Elsewhere there is obvious satire in the ‘time expats / refugees’ status in the book’s Britain, and parallels with real-world geographical refugees (on a macro level, both initially brought to Britain to serve the country’s economic needs, but eventually subject to a rather different fate).
The book is also obviously interested in the climate crisis, which it tackles in various ways with mixed success, to my mind. It’s giving too much away to go into too much detail about how it does so, but it’s clear that even in the book’s ‘present day’ things are getting significantly and predictably worse, and we find out later a little more about how future developments have led to the book’s scenario. All of this is, of course, very worthy in intent and assuming this book continues to be widely read, an important thing to smuggle in to a work that’s sold on time-travelling japes and inter-era romance. I struggled slightly with how simplistic and predictable its vision of the future was. Perhaps that’s no huge shock: we already kind of know where things are heading if our current trajectory isn’t radically and imminently changed. But I did yearn for something a little more surprising and fresh when it came to takes on our future (and real-world solutions not involving fantastical devices).
I had other issues, too. It’s a very dialogue-heavy novel, giving it a heavy sense of prose that has been written largely with screen adaptation in mind. I’m fairly convinced that this will make for good and gripping television, but if that’s the intention from the start then why not just write a script? Maybe I’m naive. Some of that dialogue did also tend to feel like expositional table tennis. Beyond that, I also found myself less engaged as the book raced towards its resolution. For those who like a pacy thriller, perhaps it ticked boxes, but I did feel like it largely abandoned its weightier concerns in favour of largely predictable ‘twists’ and further exposition that didn’t hold the attention in the same way as its earlier unusual take on the narrator and Gore’s developing and highly unusual domestic relationship.
Perhaps I’m asking too much of one book though. What it does very well is humour, character and believable relationships and romance. It’s isn’t hard science fiction so any attempt to find something new in that space will be met with disappointment. The bigger issue for me is that I felt like it touched on big and important issues but ultimately didn’t feel like it had enough to say about any of them. As a bit of fun with time and some enjoyably likeable characters it works though and that’s obviously why it’s been so successful to date.
Score
7.5
A book that I had suspicions might not be quite up my street (despite the fact that I love a bit of time travel) and one that I was quite surprised to see popping up on the Women’s Prize list (I shouldn’t have been, though, if I’m honest). It pleasantly surprised me in many ways, and I’m glad that I had a good excuse to read it, but for me at least it didn’t quite land on all of the many bases it was trying to cover.
Next up
Aria Aber’s Good Girl.
