The Ministry of Time

 The first blockbuster read of 2025! I was waiting months for Kaliane Bradley's The Ministry of Time to arrive on the reserves shelf at my local library (it was always out at the Athenaeum, too) and now I understand why. Sometimes these very popular reads end up being slightly underwhelming, but not in this case. I loved it, and I gobbled it down.

The Ministry of Time had me at time travel, honestly, but there's much more to it than that. The premise is that in our near future, the UK government has discovered the secret of time travel, and used it to bring five 'travellers' into our time. These are all people who were about to die in their own timelines anyway, so their sudden absence won't change history -- a plague survivor, a victim of the French Revolution's guillotine, a soldier from the Western Front, an Arctic explorer. The story centres on the latter, a real man called Graham Gore, retrieved from 1847, and his never-named 'bridge,' our narrator, whose job it is to help him adjust to the twenty-first century. 

There is a lot of fun with the time travellers' difficulties with modern customs. There is a pretty spicy love story. There is a thrilling plot. I might have slightly lost track of the complexities of the story towards the end, but this in no way impaired my enjoyment of this terrific, clever, more-ish novel, which also comments on outsider status, racism, family and history in interesting and subtle ways.