◗ The Ministry of Time
BY KALIANE BRADLEY
Don’t be put off by the fact that this novel has a bit of time travel in it; it’s really just quite a clever device to bring four people from the past into contemporary London. The narrator is a civil servant, one of the ‘bridges’ assigned to integrate the four ‘expats’ into the modern world (all four come from completely different times in history). The narrator’s expat is First Lieutenant Graham Gore, a real person who was part of the catastrophic Franklin expedition of 1845 (two ships were trapped when the sea froze for over a year; 129 men died and the rest just disappeared). In fact, British-Cambodian writer Kaliane Bradleydiscovered in a documentary about the expedition and by whose noble nose she was extremely taken.