Last week, I read another book that I got from that box of free books on the sidewalk, The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. I think maybe someone here recommended it a while ago. At least, the title jumped out at me when I was digging through the box, so it was one of my selections.

I love time travel stories, but not the usual “person from our time goes back in time and has adventures/falls in love” type stories. I like some twists to it, like multiple or parallel timelines, non-linear storytelling, worries about changing the timeline, etc. The book is an interesting twist in that it’s about people from the past who’ve traveled to the “present” (which is the near future). It’s sort of an inverse of the Connie Willis time travel books, in which historians travel in time to study the past. Here, they bring people from the past who were known to have died forward in time just before they died (so they won’t affect the timeline) and study how time travel affects them.

Our heroine/narrator (who remains nameless throughout the book) works as a “bridge” for the Ministry of Time, the organization doing this work. Her job is to help the time travelers transition to their new lives while keeping an eye on them and reporting on how they’re doing. She’s assigned to a polar explorer who went missing in 1847 on an expedition. She’s to live with him for a year to help him adjust. There are other bridges who have different people in their care, including a young woman from the 1600s and a man from World War I.

The author does a wonderful job of capturing the voices and worldviews of these people and what they would think of a modern world. The woman from the 1600s embraces modern life for the freedoms she didn’t have in her time, comes to love movies and becomes a Swiftie. The man from WWI has some trouble adjusting, as he finds it hard to deal with the fact that there were more wars after that devastation. The Victorian polar explorer pretty much refuses to adapt, aside from being keen on motorcycles, and maintains his stiff upper lip and his manners.

This is a slow burn of a book. The first half is mostly a comedy of manners as we deal with all these historical fish out of water, but then it takes a turn into spy thriller, as things start happening to the time travelers and a threat becomes increasingly apparent. Our heroine starts to worry that the threat is coming from within, but she doesn’t know who she can trust — and then the time travelers aren’t sure they can trust her. Meanwhile, she and her assigned time traveler have grown far closer than they were supposed to, though they have very different ideas of what constitutes “courting.” That relationship is also a slow burn, though when it does happen, it gets pretty graphic, so fair warning. I was a little uncomfortable with those bits, since this person is a real historical figure and it’s kind of weird to get that explicit about a real person that way.

Aside from the time travel hijinks and spy thriller escapades, there’s some musing on what it is to be a displaced person who can never fit in. The narrator is biracial, the daughter of a refugee, and she’s well aware that her Victorian comes from a British empire where she wouldn’t have been considered fully human. At the same time, that helps her empathize with his situation of not quite fitting in.

Aside from my discomfort with graphic scenes involving a real person, I really enjoyed the book. It’s quite funny in places and then gets really emotional and tense. I’d recommend it for fans of the Connie Willis time travel books or other time travelers exploring history stories, like the TV series Timeless.