The Ministry of Time

Every once in a while, you come across a novel that is so wildly original and fascinating in its concept that you can't stop talking about it with people. I found myself recommending The Ministry of Time to just about everyone who loves time-travel stories and thought-provoking fiction! The characters compelled me. The themes were intriguing throughout. The very premise had me excited before I even began reading...and it held my interest until the end. LOVED this book!

Just to mix it up, there are no machine intelligences here, but there are time spies and romance. After finding a time portal, the British government does the obvious thing: kidnap folks from the past to see how time travel affects people, and set up a bureaucracy to handle it. While the description feels like a romp, there’s more to it as the book deals deftly with issues of identity, selfhood, racism, and the past — and future — being foreign countries.

I am drawn to books with a distinctive voice, unusual settings, and an original premise. Add great writing and characters I want to root for and I'm hooked. This is not your average time travel book. It is less sci-fi and more about the characters and their growth and interaction. And I absolutely loved the author's brilliant way with metaphors. Here is one example: "I was lightly haunted--at the level of a chronic but manageable digestive complaint--by the memory of those "vital" files in the bin." Kudos for so much originality and beautiful writing in a book that also had… show more.

It took suspense, history, time travel, mystery, spies, romance—elements I love when they're whipped up in cross-genre—and turned them into something completely different from anything I've ever read.

We get social commentary from two unique characters in the near future that's right on target for the present, with nothing formulaic about either of them: a brilliant half-English, half-Cambodian young woman of the mid-twenty-first century and a real-life doomed nineteenth-century Arctic explorer brought forward in time.

And there's nothing formulaic or second-hand about what either of them thinks, thank goodness. A bonus for me, it's also a book about friendship. Everything… show more.