Review: The Ministry of Time

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Three and a half stars.

So difficult to review this because there was so much to like and so much I didn't really understand.

Our protagonist, whose name we never really find out, is an English civil servant. Her mother fled from the Khmer Rouge atrocities in Cambodia to England and is married to an Englishman. Our protagonist is recruited into a top-secret refugee scheme, but instead of using her language skills to help dispossessed refugees from other countries she is helping time-travellers to assimilate into modern life. The Ministry has discovered that it can transport people who died but their bodies were never found into the present day and there is a varied group of people ranging from the 1600s to WW1 who have been brought out of their own time. Each time-traveller is assigned a 'bridge' and she has been assigned Commander Graham Gore, an arctic explorer who died on Sir John Franklin's doomed expedition to the Arctic in 1847 - just as we don't know our protagonists name, the travellers are more often referred to by their year of extraction than their names.

As some of the travellers start to suffer mental health issues caused by their involuntary extraction, the stark realisation that all their friends and family are long-dead, and the stresses of adapting to modern life, can an early Victorian naval explorer and a modern Englishwoman find romance?

The modern-day narrative is also mixed with short passages from Graham's arctic expedition. Alongside a faintly sinister Big Brother oversight of the travellers and the minutiae of their everyday lives is a discourse on 'otherness' and racism.

I enjoyed this but I'm not sure what it was trying to be. Maybe I'm not clever enough to understand, and TBH the longer I think about it the more questions I have - maybe that's the sign of a good book.

I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

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