The Ministry of Time

Bradley’s gripping debut unfolds in a near future where the British government employs time travel, as administered by a clunky bureaucracy. Our unnamed narrator takes a position as companion to the devastatingly handsome Commander Graham Gore, of the lost 1845 Royal Navy Arctic Expedition. She’s hired largely because her mother was a refugee from Cambodia, as her charge is also a refugee of sorts—not from another country, but from history. At once fast-paced and deeply philosophical, Bradley weaves together a spy plot, a love story, and heaps of droll British humor as her characters converse on race, gender, inherited trauma, and imperial legacy. This is one of the weirdest, most original books I’ve read in a long time.