The Ministry of Time cover art

The Ministry of Time

 Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for £0.00
£8.99/mo thereafter. Renews automatically. Terms apply. Offer ends 31 July 2025 at 23:59 GMT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.

The Ministry of Time

By: Kaliane Bradley
Narrated by: George Weightman, Katie Leung
Try for £0.00

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Offer ends 31 July 2025 23:59 GMT. Cancel monthly.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

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 Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Science Fiction Time Travel England

Listeners also enjoyed...

 The Great When cover art
Toward Eternity cover art
The Calculating Stars cover art
On the Calculation of Volume, Book I cover art
White Silence cover art
The Very First Damned Thing cover art
A Sorceress Comes to Call cover art
Grimoires of London 1 cover art
When the Moon Hits Your Eye cover art
The Cure cover art

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)
All stars
Most relevant  
Brilliantly read. Funny, clever and thought-provoking. Was totally gripped. Possibly my favourite book of 2024.

Terrific

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I was very lucky to have stumbled onto this book only a few days after it came out. This is the kind of book I'm always looking for but never really find. I don't much like romances because they're usually too soppy and unrealistic. But I still look for books with romance in them because romance is one of the things that, as a part of life, makes it worth living. This book has that kind of romance in it.

I love time travel, but I'm often disappointed by the formulaic nature of time travel novels. This book is not like that.

Another way novels often disappoint me is when they or their writers don't care how terrible they make a reader feel, and in fact seem to strive for that - making readers feel terrible, I mean. This book treads difficult and dangerous waters and conversations and situations, but never made me feel like I had to put it down because reading it was getting too depressing.

Kaliane Bradley made me fall in love with a historical figure whom I'd never heard of, who is apparently only a tiny footnote in the history books. She also reminded me that hope is not stupid. It is everything there is. A motivating force for good. We need that in the world right now.

The saddest thing about this book is that I fear I will never find another one that I adore as much. Of course, I hope that's not true!

Thank you, Ms. Bradley. What a splendid story. I hope you'll soon write more novels for me to devour in next to no time.

Speculative and historical and gorgeous

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This made you think of how the future and present time overlap, or could occur. This depends on how you imagine it.provoked by the book. Very interesting and well presented.

interesting view of the future

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This just whips along at a great pace, touching on all sorts of crises in our modern world, viewed sometimes through they eyes of contemporary, past, and future characters.

Funny, but dark in turns, it’s beautifully narrated.

Cracking Storytelling

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The intricacies of relationships and how love can exist despite such differences in life and backgrounds

How good it switched from different times

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Thoroughly enjoyed this book. The scope and threads drew me in. Hope there is more to come from this author.

Immersion pretty much instant

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Writing style, personalities, stories and language. it all come together perfectly on this time trvale adventure.

loved it.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This is a great book but I had to revert to reading it myself as I found this audible performance very oddly cadenced, with pauses where there shouldn’t be and no pauses where there should.

Tricky reading performance

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
A clever mix of history and sci-fi time travel genres with underlying messages relevant to modern existential anxieties and post colonial English guilt

Gripping

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The writing lends well to the spoken format. Superbly lyrical writing and an excellently unpredictable story.

Glorious

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews