The Ministry of Time

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.