The Ministry of Time

An unnamed civil servant of mixed British and Cambodian heritage takes a strange new government job as a bridge, tasked with acclimating a person pulled forward through a secret time door the Ministry has discovered and does not fully understand. Her assigned expat is Graham Gore, a real officer from Sir John Franklin's doomed 1845 Arctic expedition, rescued from the exact night before his historical death and deposited, disoriented and formally polite, into a shared London flat with a television, a smartphone and a woman whose job is to keep him from either dying of culture shock or wandering off into the modern world unsupervised. Four other rescued expats settle into the same program, pulled from the Battle of Naseby, the Great Plague, the French Revolution and the Somme, and the novel's early chapters mine real comedy from watching seventeenth and twentieth century people encounter Spotify, sexual candor and modern manners at once. The narrator and Gore grow close, then intimate, even as she is required to file reports on him to a Ministry she has stopped fully trusting, and the story darkens considerably once a string of murders and sabotage inside the program point to spies from a bleaker future determined either to seize or destroy the door. The narrator eventually learns that Adela, a senior colleague she has worked alongside for months, is her own future self, and that a fellow bridge, Simellia, has been the mole feeding information to the enemy the entire time. In the confrontation that follows, the narrator destroys the door itself, killing an attacking spy and Adela along with it, and Gore forces her to delete the Ministry's own files before escaping the collapsing program with the other rescued expats to a hidden life in Alaska; the narrator is fired, and the novel ends with her resolving to go and find them rather than accept that the story is finished.

Bradley plays the culture clash chapters for genuine laughs, Gore's polar expedition manners colliding with contemporary London in scenes that read like a workplace comedy, before quietly withdrawing that comfort as the spy plot and the novel's real subject, what a government does with people it has decided to use, take over. It reads briskly and switches tone more than once without much warning, romance giving way to thriller giving way to something closer to an argument about empire and who gets treated as expendable by it; the romance itself is genuinely strange rather than conventionally swoony, built on a power imbalance the narrator herself keeps noticing and never quite resolves.