Based on the amount of publicity I’ve seen, including an advance reading copy sent to DreamHaven (thank-you, Simon and Schuster!), this book is poised to become a bestseller. There are supposedly already multiple translations and a TV series in the works. As you might suspect, this does not happen for new science fiction authors. Indeed, though the book has time travel at its core, it isn’t really SF. But it’s not really a mainstream book either.

The Ministry of Time is an interesting book, fast-paced and well-written. Though the science makes no sense, its version of time travel is no more objectionable than in any standard SF book. There is romance, but the book isn’t just about that either. The joy is in the exploration of social mores over time, as five people from the “present” (a near future dystopian London, where climate change is verging on disaster) and five people “rescued” from the past, interact. It is a treatise on being an expat; on not-belonging in one’s time and place.

The main plot revolves around the relationship between our nameless first-person narrator, whose mother escaped from Khmer Rouge Cambodia, and Commander Graham Gore, rescued from Fitzgerald’s doomed 1845 Arctic Expedition. It seems likely that Kaliene Bradley did a lot of research about the expedition, and was already half in love with Commander Gore before she wrote the book. Their interactions are delightfully full of intelligence, warmth, and humor. And, of course, growing sexual attraction.

There are also Lieutenant Cardingham (1645) who is an unrepentant chauvinist, Margaret (1665) who plays the part of the suddenly-liberated lesbian, nearly-invisible Anne (1793) and Arthur Reginald-Smythe (1916) whose name fits him perfectly. Together they try to understand modern life and the modern woman. When they fail, which is often, it is usually because modern life is truly and inexplicably odd. Their observations are wise and hilarious: Margaret wants a “tabard ‘broidered” with the words Feminist Killjoy, and Arthur reinvents the theremin. But it is Graham’s keen insight and mild sarcasm that propel the reader happily forward, even as the true nature of the time travel program is revealed and tensions begin to rise.