The Ministry of Time: A Novel

"It’s a page-turning account of the scooping of a number of people out of the past and then what happens to them when they end up in a near future. One of them is Commander Graham Gore, who in our world died in Sir John Franklin’s attempt to cross the Northwest Passage in the Arctic, and has a present-day minder to help him cope with the inevitable culture clash. Both main characters are utterly believable and you wait for what seems to be the inevitable romance to develop. It’s become hugely popular in the BookTok community and I look forward to more novels from her. Time travel can get bogged down with paradoxes and other complications. It can feel like a logic puzzle – there’s one classic story, which I won’t name because of spoilers, where the main character becomes both his parents and indeed all the characters in the story. Or there’s the “Let’s kill Hitler” cliché. Bradley uses paradox more subtly, but it’s characterisation and character development which sold it to me – who is Gore and how will the narrator relate to him?"

"Okay, this is romantic comedy, romantic tragedy, time travel , history, workplace comedy. It’s all these different things: a great comic romantic novel. It has a really weird premise. You never really understand why all this is happening, but you don’t care. The characters are strong, the story is strong. I can’t recommend this highly enough for anyone to read as a standalone novel right now. It has a strong beginning, middle, and end. The fact that it is funny is almost secondary, because it’s funny situationally—funny in the way it’s written, in the observation. It’s soon going to be made into an expensive television adaption by the BBC. Which makes sense. It has everything: love, romance, sadness. All that."