The Ministry of Time

A Novel

English language

Published 2024 by Simon & Schuster.

ISBN:
978-1-6680-4514-5
Copied ISBN!

View on OpenLibrary

4 stars (1 review)

In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and is, shortly afterward, told what project she’ll be working on. A recently established government ministry is gathering “expats” from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible—for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time.

She is tasked with working as a “bridge”: living with, assisting, and monitoring the expat known as “1847” or Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to be living with an unmarried woman who regularly shows her calves, surrounded by outlandish concepts such as “washing machine,” “Spotify,” and “the collapse of the British Empire.” But he adjusts quickly; he is, after all, an explorer by trade. Soon, what the bridge initially thought would be, at best, a seriously …

4 editions

Time-travelling horny spy romance

4 stars

As I write this review, I'm once again finding myself on the goodreads page for this book (no idea why I do this, like I want to check my own taste against that of 'the people'?) and I'm very surprised to find that The ministry of time is an extremely polarising book. One star ('I'm thankful to this book for providing some needed perspective on what a bad book is'), or five star ('the author is a genius'), kind of thing. I would have thought it would be a solid 3-4 star crowd-pleaser. To me, it reads like one of those addictive Netflix series with a quirky plot, fun dialogues, and just enough nods to social issues to make it possible to watch without feeling completely gross afterwards.

The basic plot (very minor spoiler) revolves around a young, British-Cambodian public officer, whose job is to help / monitor a British …