The Ministry of Time

In a near-future London, a fledgling government department has learned to pull people out of the past. To test whether time travel is survivable, the Ministry recruits a handful of "expats" — historical figures plucked from moments just before their recorded deaths — and assigns each a "bridge," a civil servant tasked with helping them adjust to the twenty-first century.

The novel's narrator, the daughter of a Cambodian refugee, is paired with Commander Graham Gore, a real Victorian naval officer who died on the doomed Franklin Arctic expedition. As the two share a house through a strange, funny, tender year of cigarettes, Spotify, and slow adjustment, wary professionalism gives way to something deeper — even as it becomes clear that the Ministry's motives are not what they seem.

Kaliane Bradley's debut is at once a time-travel romance, a workplace comedy, and a spy thriller, and a sharp meditation on empire, complicity, and what we owe the people history leaves behind.