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The Ministry of Time

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The Ministry of Time

By: Kaliane Bradley
Narrated by: George Weightman, Katie Leung
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About this listen

The Time Traveller's Wife meets David Mitchell meets Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow meets Kate & Leopold in this debut novel from an award-winning writer.

There are several ways to tell a story.

A boy meets a girl. The past meets the future. A finger meets a trigger. The beginning meets the end. England is forever; England must fall.

A civil servant starts working as a 'bridge' - a liaison, helpmeet and housemate - in an experimental project that brings expatriates from the past into the twenty-first century. This is a science-fiction story.

In a London safehouse in the 2020s, a disorientated Victorian polar explorer chain smokes while listening to Spotify and learning about political correctness. This is a comedy.

During a long, sultry summer - as the shadows around them grow long and dangerous - two people fall in love, against all odds. This is a romance.

The Ministry of Time is a novel about Commander Graham Gore (R.N. c.1809-c.1847) and a woman known only as the bridge. As their relationship turns from the strictly professional into something more and uneasy truths begin to emerge, they are forced to face the reality of the project that brought them together.

Can love triumph over the structures and histories that shape them?

©2024 Kaliane Bradley (P)2024 Hodder & Stoughton Limited Best of 2024 Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Science Fiction Time Travel Witty Funny

Critic Reviews

A delightfully audacious screwball comedy (Katie Goh, Fiction to be excited for in 2024)
Within the first couple of pages I was gripped. The novel is clever, witty and thought-provoking, asking the question of what any of us might do if we could engage live with people from the past. Kaliane Bradley is a wonderful writer and I can't wait to read what she does next (Kate Mosse, bestselling author of THE GHOST SHIP)
Holy smokes this novel is an absolute cut above! Kaliane Bradley leaps into a storytelling league of her own. This book is a deadly serious speculative fiction but it is also one of the funniest books I've read in years. It is exciting, surprising, intellectually provocative, weird, radical, tender and moving. I missed it when I was away from it. I will hurry to re-read it. Make room on your bookshelves for a new classic. (Max Porter, bestselling author of SHY)
Smart and affecting, full of ideas plus that slow-burning love story, it's a wonderful debut (David Nicholls, author of YOU ARE HERE)
An outrageously brilliant debut with a premise that just gets more and more original. The Ministry of Time pulls off the neatest trick of speculative fiction, first estranging us from our own era, and then facilitating our immigration back into the present; but it is also a love story, exploratory, sensitive, charged with possibility, and powered by desire, reminding us that history is synonymous with human beings, and that we all have the ability to change it. This is already the best new book I will have read next year (Eleanor Catton, author of BIRNAM WOOD)

What listeners say about The Ministry of Time

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Profile Image for Maija Burtmanis

Cracking story and superbly narrated!

Really loved this book - fantastic, fabulistic, futuristic story! Great characters and such whimsical imagination trooping through the Eras.

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Profile Image for tara hartrick

Entertaining and original

An engaging story with a original concept at its centre. Narration was wonderful and added to the sense of each individual character.

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Profile Image for Anonymous User

language is beautiful

The extraordinary complexity of the narrative is wonderful. It would be easy to get a bit lost, but I didn't.

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Profile Image for Anonymous User

A wave of beautiful language…

Just wonderful … a must for all those that love to travel through time and hear its distinctive sounds.

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Profile Image for Charles H

Terrific and original story only spoiled by an overly mechanical performance.

This is the story that has everything! Mystery, romance and thrills. This is speculative fiction at its best ... but I suggest you read the book yourself, or you might get bored by this performance.

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Profile Image for Cassandra

Well written and told - mostly - very intriguing

The narrator has a great voice, its a fascinating read, the author has a way of succinctly describing the hell out of feelings and scenes, sometimes it felt like she was really trying to have a very original vocabulary, but maybe that is the vocabulary and way of the author, intriguing either way. A mostly well told story, but I felt it was maybe too compressed, as in it could have been expanded on and explained a bit more but it was still good and maybe that was the way the author wanted to tell it, kind of hard and fast and disjointed while giving you just enough info to get it. All over would recommend. interesting story and universe but as an Aussie I don't really understand/experience the class separations in the UK, but I can grasp the concept.

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Profile Image for Anonymous User

quintessentially English ScFi

quintessentially English ScFi in character and plot. Being an expat it was like going home to London and England present and past.
Rich emotionally genuine characters in a unique dilemmas

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Profile Image for Mia Lauze

A work of genius

I’m not a big sci fi fan but when there are some gems out there (Bone Clocks, Tome Travellers Wife for example) and this is one of them. I loved it because it combined sci fi with history and romance and the writing is exquisitely descriptive. It’s on my all time favourites list!

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Profile Image for Jonathan

Fun concept - annoying narration

Dear Voice Over Artists, Directors, Producers, it’s frustrating when narrators read characters of opposite sex dialogue and adjust their voice. Like in this instance, when the female narrator reads a male voice, it just sounds silly. Like pantomime. I’ve heard other male narrators use higher pitch for female voices - also ridiculous. Just read the dialogue in your natural voice. Don’t need to
Overthink it.

Other than that, good fun book. Liked the concept. Lovely poetic writing. Lost a bit of interest in the middle. But overall a good read.

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Profile Image for Fay Pirotta

A chicken handbag of a story brilliantly brought to life

Loved this story which covers so much. It reminded me in part of the TV series The Terror, about the ill-fated trip to find the Nth-West passage, and I was pleased to find out that this show inspired this story. But it is more than that. It is an espionage novel, a love story, a critique of race relations, and an eco-novel. The acting of the narrators was excellent, though I missed a few words that were spoken softly (my hearing is not what it should be). I’m keen now to read the hard copy so I can savour some of the language.

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