A disillusioned civil servant signs on to a secret time travel project in Kaliane Bradley's inventive debut, The Ministry of Time. In near-future England, the government has discovered technology to bring people forward through time and has collected five Brits from previous centuries. The unnamed protagonist is hired as a "bridge," someone who will live and work with one of these "expats" from history. She is assigned to Commander Graham Gore of the Royal Navy, a sailor and polar explorer transported just before his death during the doomed 1845 Franklin expedition to discover the Northwest Passage through the Arctic.

Bradley deftly blends science fiction, romance and thriller, creating an immersive world and plot that cry out for film adaptation. Readers are so swept up by the workplace and culture-clash humor that the moral quandaries and behind-the-scenes scheming form a background hum only noticeable when the protagonist is forced to acknowledge them. As the bridges spend time with their charges, and the expats learn to live in their new world, the narrator and Gore's initial attraction bumps and jostles its way toward a romance. Stuffy Victorian Gore is simply not equipped to court a modern woman, and the narrator is determined not to be courted. The pair spend nearly every hour together, however, creating a situation replete with sexual tension even as they engage in the most mundane of activities: "He was an anachronism, a puzzle, a piss-take, a problem, but he was, above all things, a charming man. In every century, they make themselves at home."

Bradley's expertly drawn characters are both entertaining and intriguing. Referred to as Nineteen-sixteen, Arthur Reginald-Smyth is a young gay or bisexual man taken from the front lines of the Battle of the Somme in World War I. Margaret ("Maggie") Kemble--Sixteen-sixty-five--is a lesbian who was locked in a room alone to die of bubonic plague during the Great Plague of London. Odious Lieutenant Thomas Cardingham--Sixteen-forty-five--was taken from the Battle of Naseby during the First English Civil War. Anne Spencer was saved from beheading during the 1793 French Revolution. And 38-year-old Graham Gore, also known as Eighteen-forty-seven, is a fictionalized version of the real Commander Gore, who died with the rest of the men during the Franklin expedition. Arthur's sweetness and pining for Graham endear him to readers, while Maggie's exuberance and foul mouth are equally compelling. They quite often steal scenes from Graham--a feat, considering the man's appeal.

Between chapters, Bradley shares Gore's story: a haunting narrative of seafaring adventure and camaraderie turned frozen nightmare. These interstitials remind readers that the main story isn't the entire picture, that each individual inhabits their own reality inside the collective experience. "Nineteen-sixteen was as incomprehensible to Sixteen-forty-five as I was," the narrator says. "Everyone was paddling in their own era-locked pool of loneliness." Bradley's complicated narrator is sometimes difficult to root for, though she never quite fits the label of anti-heroine. She grapples with depression and PTSD, but considers both to be a personal failing. Her upbringing as the daughter of a survivor of the Khmer Rouge shapes her outlook, whether she acknowledges it or not. Her refusal to process her own trauma meaningfully at times inhibits her ability to empathize with the expats; her journey from disaffected government cog to slightly more empathetic friend and partner is slow but satisfying.

Nothing about secret government-managed time travel is simple, however, and soon the protagonists encounter problems of both the ethical and gun-wielding varieties. Some months into the project, the narrator is abruptly cut off from her supervisor. The unanswered questions and suspicious happenings continue to mount and soon she, Gore, and the other expats are caught in a battle not just for their lives, but also the future. England is wracked by powerful storms and heat waves, shocking to Gore, unsettlingly normal to the narrator, and a portent of things to come for readers. The inevitable question of changing the past comes up several times, and Bradley skirts the answer by presenting the opinions of several cagey characters and of the Ministry itself. Which is correct? Could they be using their new power to prevent catastrophic climate change or any of the other humanitarian and ecological disasters of the Anthropocene? Who would benefit?

Bradley also addresses the idea of assimilation and diaspora at large. What does it mean to be a refugee or an immigrant? This question is echoed in the Ministry's attempts to resolve issues with some of the expats not showing up on scanners or in other measurements: the problem of "hereness" and "thereness," or how aligned an expat is with their current time and their home time. "At the crux of all the time-travel hypotheses was the question: how do you measure a person?"

The chaotic climax of the novel gives way in the end to something wistful, a temporary happiness found despite a looming, dire future. "Forgiveness and hope are miracles. They let you change your life. They are time-travel." The Ministry of Time encapsulates life's paradoxes as easily as it transcends genre. Readers may see echoes of Severance's disaffected second-generation office worker-turned-heroine, or the romantic time travel adventure of Outlander, but Kaliane Bradley has created something equally brilliant and entirely her own. --Suzanne Krohn

Kaliane Bradley (photo: Robin Christian)

Kaliane Bradley is a British Cambodian writer and editor based in London. Her short fiction has appeared in Somesuch Stories, the Willowherb Review, Electric Literature, Catapult, and Extra Teeth, among others. She was the winner of the 2022 Harper's Bazaar Short Story Prize and the 2022 V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize. In Bradley's debut novel, The Ministry of Time (coming from Avid Reader Press on May 7), set in near-future London, a British Cambodian translator is hired to work at the new Ministry of Time for a secret project: guiding refugees from history through the transition to the modern era. It's a genre-blending science fiction romance thriller literary romp that tackles a wide range of social and ethical issues with humor and nuance.

Britain's new Ministry of Time brings several "expats" forward through time in the moments before their deaths. What led you to choose the time periods you did?

For Margaret Kemble (Great Plague of London) and Arthur Reginald-Smyth (First World War), I picked time periods that occupy a specific space in the British cultural imagination because of our exposure to them in fiction and in the British school history curriculum. (It would have been slightly easier to take them from Tudor England and the Second World War for this same reason, but it made less sense for the book.) For Anne Spencer (French Revolution) and Thomas Cardingham (Battle of Naseby), I asked some friends to pick disasters with high enough body counts that [the characters] removal from history into the 21st century would go unnoted.

I couldn't help but draw parallels between what the Ministry is doing with "bridges," tasked with assimilating the expats to modern England, and what we tend to expect of all refugees. Did the Ministry decide to pair two of the all-white expats with BIPOC bridges because of a perceived ability to help them assimilate?

The two BIPOC bridges get a raw deal because, in addition to being bridges, they're also supposed to be representational, in a way the white bridges don't have to be. (This is also why they are assigned to the most "recent" expats, an Edwardian and a Victorian, a tasty bit of racism about the perceived non-existence of people of colour in historical Britain.) There's a conversation early on in the book--centred around the concept of "racism," which is not a term Graham Gore understands--which I hope shows how insidious representational politics can be when it's considered an end in itself (Diversity win! The person working in this sinister government project is a woman of colour!), rather than the means to an end. It's also an exercise in bureaucratic box-ticking: check how multicultural we are here in 21st-century Britain, we can cause PTSD in workers from every conceivable ethnic background.

The Ministry provides therapy sessions for the expats and bridges, but the narrator doesn't sign up. Later, she develops PTSD after witnessing a particularly violent and personal death. Her mother witnessed and experienced horrors in Cambodia before immigrating. How does this impact the narrator's processing of trauma?

The bridge's experience of generational trauma is that she'd rather not have it, because it makes her different in a way she doesn't find useful. She tends to understand her personhood in terms of utility and power, and trauma is both not useful and disempowering. There's a certain amount of "shut up and get on with it" about her approach to dealing with trauma which is, in itself, a trauma response. When she develops PTSD, she thinks of herself as not productive, not in control, not doing her job properly. This barrier to her interrogating both the first-hand trauma and the inherited trauma guides some of the erroneous decisions she makes in the aftermath.

Graham Gore is a fascinating character in real life and in the book. How did you learn about him and what inspired you to make him the leading man in this book? Why would the Ministry have chosen to bring back someone recognizable along with the other relative nobodies?

I met him by accident, on a Wikipedia page. I was watching AMC's The Terror (2018), a TV series I adored but also, on first watch, had a bit of difficulty following. I looked up a fan wiki for the first episode, just to check that what I thought was happening was actually happening, and came across Gore's intriguing name. I clicked the link to his official Wikipedia page and the rest is history!

Love and light to my dead boyfriend--but poor Gore is, in the annals of polar exploration, a relative nobody. He's mostly a footnote in accounts about the Franklin expedition--although from what we can tell, he was a popular and well-liked officer. He is also one of only two people officially named as dead in the Victory Point note (the other being the expedition's leader, Sir John Franklin), so for the Ministry's purposes they have a guarantee that his removal won't disrupt the passage of history.

Gore was taken from 1847, but his hotness transcends time. Did you really get all that from a single daguerreotype?

I'm very glad that you think so! The hotness was partly the daguerreotype--I do like a Nose--but is also significantly attributable to James Fitzjames's pen portrait: a man of great stability of character, a very good officer, and the sweetest of tempers. That was the line that hooked me! Among the attributes I find most attractive are calmness, confidence, and kindness. While I was developing the fictionalized Gore, I tried to make sure he was calm, confident and kind, rather than cold, arrogant or nice--there are shades of nuance between kind and nice, I think.

Mixed with social commentary, internal grappling and timeline wanderings is a whole lot of humor and romance. How did you balance everything?

On humour, Terry Pratchett--one of my all-time favourite writers--said, "The problem is that we think the opposite of funny is serious. It is not.... [T]he opposite of funny is not funny, the opposite of serious is not serious.... Humour has its uses. Laughter can get through the keyhole while seriousness is still hammering on the door. New ideas can ride in on the back of a joke, old ideas can be given an added edge." Comic writing is not inherently unserious. It can wrangle nuance and complexity; it just uses a different set of tools. Laughter is an instinctive response; it has to get us in the gut or not at all. I don't think anything can be truly funny unless it is grounded in the immediate, the intimate, the urgent. Well, that's not true, I also think it's funny when a cat sneezes and visibly startles itself. But you see what I mean.

I think this is true of the romance in The Ministry of Time too. At its core, it is a love story, but any love story is a story about living as fully and honestly as possible in someone else's mind, and letting them live as fully and honestly as possible in yours. No one comes into love clothed in a single genre.

What's on your nightstand?

Landbridge by Y-Dang Troeung--I've read it several times, but it's been so instrumental in shaping my thinking about refugees' lives, imposed narratives and living a love-filled life despite trauma, that I often revisit it. It is one of the most important books I have ever read. Also my current read, Moby-Dick, which is as bonkers and brilliant as everyone promised me it would be. Now that's line work! --Suzanne Krohn