The Ministry of Time

The Ministry of Time is the debut novel by Kaliane Bradley, a blend of science fiction, romance and spy story set in a near-future Britain. A civil servant accepts a well-paid government job without knowing much about it, only to learn she has been recruited to a secret project. A new ministry has found a way to pull people out of the past and into the present, and she is assigned to live with one of these arrivals as his companion and minder. Her charge is Commander Graham Gore, a Victorian naval officer recorded as having died on Sir John Franklin's doomed Arctic expedition of 1845. As the two grow closer, she begins to question what the project is really for and who it is meant to protect. The novel was a 2025 Hugo Award finalist.