The Ministry Of Time by Kailane Bradley:

This book had been tipped for success for some time, it’s was in all the ‘best books of 2024’ lists, the international rights have been sold and the TV adaptation is already in progress.  I’m here to tell you that the hype is/was/will be real. 

In a near future/becoming dystopian Britain, time travel is discovered.  People are saved from a variety of fates and named ‘expats’.  They are assigned a ‘bridge’, someone to acclimatise those saved to 21st century life and the novel contains the relationship between a British-Cambodian civil servant and Graham Gore, a 19th Arctic explorer.  

Ok, that’s a vague and allusive stub of the narrative, but I’m not the kind of blogger who’ll let slip the book’s delicious secrets.  One twist can be guessed immediately, but that’s the main strand of the narrative.  The others, you won’t see coming a mile off. It’s a book that is part science-fiction, part thriller, part-deadpan comedy.  Its roots are in flash fiction (Gore did actually exist), but that’s not to dismiss the effortless comic skill of someone adapting to a pre-apocalyptic future.  I loved the other characters too, especially Margaret the proto-lesbian saved from the plague, let loose in hipster London.  

The marketing material compares it to Time Traveller’s Wife  or Cloud Atlas and they’re two of my favourite books.  I think that does the author a great disservice, as The Ministry Of Time is quite unlike anything you’ll read this year or any year.  It’s published by Hodder And Stoughton on May 14th and I thank them for a preview copy.