The Ministry of Time

Critics Review

• With a thoroughly offbeat love story at its heart and subtly interwoven musings on the UK’s imperial legacy, it’s fast moving and riotously entertaining, a genre-busting blend of wit and wonder

  Observer

• A delightfully audacious screwball comedy

  i-D

• Bradley’s compelling debut novel asks the important question: What if the sexiest guy in the history book moved into your flat? . . . Part romantic comedy, part speculative thriller, the novel weaves together commentary on colonialism, bureaucracy and government with carefully drawn characters and gradually unfurling relationships. Don’t start it right before bed unless you want to see the sun come up

  GQ

• An assured and fun debut . . . one of our books of the year

  Stylist

• A thrilling time-travelling romance about a real-life Victorian polar explorer who is brought from the past into 21st-century London as part of a government experiment

  Sunday Times

• Wildly original . . . How horny can a speculative fiction novel be? Bradley’s debut is at once an outrageously fun comedy while also providing keen analyses on the nature of colonialism, power & bureaucracy

  Dazed

• Social media is already aflutter about this one, a time-travelling love story

  Grazia

• One of the year’s most exciting debuts is The Ministry of Time . . . a genre-bending romcom about a Victorian polar explorer and a millennial civil servant who end up as housemates thanks to a government experiment in time travel

  BBC.com

• One of the most anticipated debuts of the year

  Elle

• Bradley writes with sparkling vividness and precision, infectiously capturing the mind-bending effects of love. Whizzing up time-travel, romance, espionage, friendship and loss with dazzling assurance, this riotous journey into the British empire and establishment reckons with our colonial past, our myopic present and our fragile future

  Bookseller

• Within the first couple of pages I was gripped. The novel is clever, witty and thought-provoking, asking the question of what any of us might do if we could engage live with people from the past. Kaliane Bradley is a wonderful writer and I can’t wait to read what she does next

  Kate Mosse, bestselling author of THE GHOST SHIP

• Holy smokes this novel is an absolute cut above! Kaliane Bradley leaps into a storytelling league of her own. This book is a deadly serious speculative fiction but it is also one of the funniest books I’ve read in years. It is exciting, surprising, intellectually provocative, weird, radical, tender and moving. I missed it when I was away from it. I will hurry to re-read it. Make room on your bookshelves for a new classic.

  Max Porter, bestselling author of SHY

• Smart and affecting, full of ideas plus that slow-burning love story, it’s a wonderful debut

  David Nicholls, author of YOU ARE HERE

• An outrageously brilliant debut with a premise that just gets more and more original. The Ministry of Time pulls off the neatest trick of speculative fiction, first estranging us from our own era, and then facilitating our immigration back into the present; but it is also a love story, exploratory, sensitive, charged with possibility, and powered by desire, reminding us that history is synonymous with human beings, and that we all have the ability to change it. This is already the best new book I will have read next year

  Eleanor Catton, author of BIRNAM WOOD

• As electric, charming, whimsical and strange as its ripped-from-history cast. (Extremely.) I loved every second I spent wrapped up in Kaliane Bradley’s stunning prose, the moments that made me laugh and those that made my heart ache. This is a book that surprises as much as it delights, and I’m already impatiently waiting for whatever Bradley concocts next

  Emily Henry, author of HAPPY PLACE

• There aren’t many books that are as funny as they are clever as they are compelling. The Ministry of Time is hugely enjoyable: ingeniously constructed, beautifully written, and unexpectedly sexy. It is the rarest of creations: a boldly entertaining page-tuner that is also deeply, thoughtfully engaged with our past, present and future. A weird and tender time-travel love story. A brilliantly original debut. Your next crush is a long-dead Arctic explorer

  Joanna Quinn, author of THE WHALEBONE THEATRE

• With its ingenious concept and gripping plot, The Ministry of Time is the most fun you could possibly ever have while engaging so seriously with history and our place in it. Bradley has a gift for locating our common humanity in people’s irreducible eccentricity. This is a book to read and re-read: you’ll want to fall in love with these characters over and over again

  Diana Reid, author of LOVE & VIRTUE

• Funny, moving, original, intelligent, beautifully written and with a thunderous plot

  Nathan Filer, author of THE SHOCK OF THE FALL

• I haven’t enjoyed a book this much for a very long time. A wonderful, joyful, intelligent and hilarious read. I underlined as I read and felt a strong sadness at finishing because I could not read it for the first time again

  Daisy Johnson, author of EVERYTHING UNDER

• I gobbled this up in twenty-four hours: I simply could not stop reading it. Kaliane Bradley writes with the maximalist confidence of P. G. Wodehouse, but also with the page-turning pining of Sally Rooney. It’s thought-provoking and horribly clever – but it also made me laugh out loud. And it’s got a cracking plot! I loved The Ministry of Time and I can’t wait for everyone to read it so I can talk about it more

  Alice Winn, author of IN MEMORIAM

• A fantastic debut: conceptually brilliant, really funny, genuinely moving, written in the most exquisite language and with a wonderful articulation of the knotty complexities of a mixed-race heritage

  Mark Haddon, author of THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME

• Sly and illusionless in its use of history, lovely in its sentences, warm – no, hotter than that – in its characterisation, devastating in its denouement. A weird, kind, clever, heartsick little time bomb of a book

  Francis Spufford, author of GOLDEN HILL

• The Ministry of Time is a feast of a novel – singular, alarming and (above all) incredibly sexy. An astonishingly assured debut, offering weird and unexpected delights on every page. I will be running towards whatever Kaliane Bradley writes next

  Julia Armfield, author of OUR WIVES UNDER THE SEA

• What a stunning and remarkable wonder! What if time travel were run by a bureaucracy? It would give us The Ministry of Time – a book that takes the history of colonialism, the British Empire, Cambodian genocide, and other terrible moments of history, and reminds us we are still living with the remnants of these troubled pasts. But also, it’s filled to the brim with laugh-out-loud humour, and possibly the best description of a dingy pub I’ve ever read in my life. There’s something for everyone – world history, side-splitting humour, lusty tension, brilliant prose, and characters to root for desperately. Bradley describes someone in the novel as being “sweaty and vibeless”, but I want to counter with this: The Ministry of Time is the most vibe-forward book I have ever read

  Vanessa Chan, author of THE STORM WE MADE

• Unputdownable, endearing and mind-bending . . . what more could you want out of a contemporary novel? Kaliane Bradley is a timeless talent. Whip-smart, empathetic, and totally original

  Sharlene Teo, author of PONTI

• Fantastically fun and deadly serious, The Ministry of Time is an ecstatic celebration of fiction in all its vehement, ungovernable, mutinous glory

  Megha Majumdar, author of A BURNING

• Sharp, sexy and utterly self-assured, this is the rarest jewel of them all: a book you can press into the hands of everyone you know, and guarantee it will grab them firmly by the lapels. A truly compulsive debut, packed with humour, heart and heat – we are lucky to exist in the same timeline as Kaliane Bradley

  Alice Slater, author of DEATH OF A BOOKSELLER

• Compelling, clever, sexy and heartbreaking, The Ministry of Time is one of those books where you reach the end and immediately start again because it’s just too hard to let go. Every single page thoroughly delights

  Georgia Summers, author of CITY OF STARDUST

• My favourite debut novel in a very long time – sexy, sad, funny and clever. I read it in a in absolute rush

  Jenny Colgan, author of LITTLE BEACH STREET BAKERY

• A rare book with very good bones: sharply funny and heart wrenching, a rollicking good time about love, power, politics and time travel

  Sarvat Hasin, author of THE GIANT DARK

• The Ministry of Time gave me back the joy of reading. Heady, compulsive and heartbreaking, Kaliane Bradley deftly balances humour and magic with an interrogation of colonialism, nationalism, otherness and climate fear. Simultaneously wild, irreverent and state-of-the-nation, this novel asks us to consider the histories that have led us to the present moment, in order to salvage our uncertain future

  Jessica Andrews, author of MILK TEETH