Welcome to The Ministry of Time, the exhilarating debut novel by Kailane Bradley. This book is a time travel romance, a speculative spy thriller, a workplace comedy, and an ingeniously constructed exploration of the nature of truth and power. It is also a story about the potential for love to change it all.

In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams. Shortly afterward, she is told about the project she'll be working on: a recently established government ministry is gathering "expats" from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible—for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time. She is tasked with working as a "bridge": living with, assisting, and monitoring the expat known as "1847" or Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin's doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic, so he's a little disoriented to be living with an unmarried woman who regularly shows her calves, surrounded by concepts such as "washing machine," "Spotify," and "the collapse of the British Empire." But he adjusts quickly; after all, he is an explorer by trade. Soon, what the bridge initially thought would be a seriously uncomfortable housemate dynamic, evolves into something much more. Over the course of an unprecedented year, the bridge will be forced to confront the past that shaped her choices, and the choices that will shape the future.

An exquisitely original and feverishly fun fusion of genres and ideas, The Ministry of Time asks the universal question: What happens if you put a disaffected millennial and a Victorian polar explorer in a house together?