A woman working for the Ministry of Time is tasked with helping assimilate a sailor pulled through time, who more than a hundred years prior was on a doomed Arctic expedition and would have died otherwise. Hijinks ensue.

I didn’t know anything about the Ministry of Time before picking it up and reading it other than it being in contention for the Best Novel of 2024 in certain circles (at least that’s what I had understood prior to picking it up).

I “get” it. It’s an ambitious novel that succeeds at combining multiple genres that usually don’t mix in a way that really works.

Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time is something like three parts romance, one part thriller, one part history fiction and one part science fiction. At its heart, it’s a romance. There’s the constant longing and desire expressed by the protagonist and the “will they won’t they” throughline that is used to prop up all the other genre tropes Bradley is masterfully juggling.

What surprised me most about The Ministry of Time was the tone. It’s vulgar, it’s funny, it’s sarcastic… In a way that feels natural to me that I don’t often see in the novels I read.

Kaliane Bradley, and the narrator in The Ministry of Time, is a “passing” mixed race person raised by an immigrant mother displaced from her country and her people. This is relevant to my experience of reading through the novel because it comes up a lot in the text and because this is also my lived experience.

I can’t say that Bradley’s portrayal of this “sexy AF sailor plucked straight from the Victorian era” speaks to me in that way but there’s a lot in the Ministry of Time that does. And, it seems obvious to me that this is partially because Bradley, the narrator and I all share this common history of immigrant mothers and how important it is to our understanding who we are, where we belong and how we interact with the world.

It’s good, it’s entertaining and I feel comfortable boosting the signal of the Ministry of Time in my own little way because of how well it portrays a lived experience of mine that I’ve never been able to put into words. Seeing parts of that experience expressed in this work that’s doing so many other impressive things warms my heart.

Although, I wonder what Bradley’s next novel will look like considering that she’s obviously self-inserted parts of herself (in a very fan fiction-y way) into the text, as the narrator. What will her next protagonist look like?