The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (2024)

The government now has access to time travel technology. The novel is told in the first person from the perspective of an unnamed female civil servant of Cambodian heritage (for the purposes of this report I’ll refer to her as P for protagonist) who passes a vigorous interview process for a special assignment. Her interviewer is an eye patch-wearing senior operative named Adela, who looks like she has had a lot of cosmetic surgery. Her task; to be one of five “bridges”, helping one of five “expats” extracted from the past through a “time door”. Once extracted, the time door closes; no one can follow them, and they cannot go back to their original timelines. P’s fellow bridges are Simellia, Ralph, Ivan and Ed. The heroine’s expat is Commander Graham Gore, a real person, and member of the crew who sailed on the ill-fated voyages of the Terror and the Erebus ships in 1845. The other expats are Margaret (Maggie) Kemble, extracted from the Great Plague of London in 1665, Lieutenant Cardingham extracted from the Battle of Naseby in 1645, Captain Arthur Reginald-Smith, a soldier from 1916, and Anne Spencer, from Robespierre’s Paris – 1793. Expats are microchipped on arrival for tracking, and assessed regularly through psychological and medical tests.

The protagonist takes Graham to their assigned accommodation and begins to explain the concepts that underpin “how we live now” – TV, the internet, the first world war, gender equality, racism, and post- colonial discourse. She breaks the news that none of his fellow crew members from the Terror and Erebus returned from the Arctic. Graham starts to socialise with the other expats and demonstrates an ability to absorb modern concepts; he learns to cook and buys a motorbike. However, much of his behaviour is alien; he is an excellent hunter and kills all the squirrels in the garden with an air rifle, for example. P quickly realises she is attracted to Graham and betrays this to Adela during a routine polygraph test.

P loves spending time with her new housemate; they invite Margaret and Arthur to dinner and learn they are both homosexual and feel they have a chance for more freedom in their new lives. Graham and Arthur plan a holiday to Scotland to hunt deer. However, work quickly becomes far less pleasant. First,