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WORK TITLE: THE MINISTRY OF TIME
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: London, England
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: British
LAST VOLUME:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and editor.
AWARDS:Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize, 2022; V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize, 2022; Observer Best of 2024.
WRITINGS
Contributor of short stories to literary journals, including Somesuch Stories, The Willowherb Review, Electric Literature, Catapult, and Extra Teeth.
SIDELIGHTS
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Bradley is a British-Cambodian writer and editor based in London who has published short fiction in various U.K. literary journals. She received the 2022 Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize and the 2022 V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize. Her debut science fiction novel, the acclaimed The Ministry of Time, about a government time travel program that brings people from history to the present, entered an international bidding war for publication and a television adaptation, and was named a 2024 literary highlight in the Sunday Times and BBC.
In The Ministry of Time, in the near future, the British government opens a new secret agency to determine if time travel is possible for the human body and not detrimental to the time line. The agency brings “expats” from across time into the present, where a civil servant known as a “bridge” processes, chaperones, and helps the expat adjust to the disorientation and culture shock of the future. The book’s protagonist, an unnamed woman working as a translator for Britain’s Ministry of Defence, gets a new job as a bridge for expat number 1847, known as the real-life Commander Graham Gore, who presumably died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic. As part of the program, the chain-smoking but handsome Gore lives with the bridge and learns about washing machines, nightclubs, and Spotify, as he grapples with the idea that the British empire has collapsed in the ensuing years. As the two characters become romantically close, they learn about the true motives behind the government’s time travel endeavors.
A Publishers Weekly reviewer reported on the thriller-like mortal threats to the narrator and Gore, but was more appreciative of Bradley’s depictions of Gore’s reaction to modern life and sexual freedoms, concluding: “It’s a sly and ingenious vehicle for commentary on the 21st century’s disruptions and displacements.” Calling the book taut, artfully unspooled, and vividly written, a Kirkus Reviews critic added that the quasi-futuristic story doesn’t take itself too seriously, yet “it also offers a meaningful, nuanced perspective on the challenges we face, the choices we make, and the way we live and love today.”
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 2024, review of The Ministry of Time.
Publishers Weekly, March 11, 2024, review of The Ministry of Time, p. 36.
ONLINE
Publishers Weekly, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (January 16, 2024), Sophia Stewart, “Avid Reader Bets Big on Kaliane Bradley’s ‘The Ministry of Time.’”
Kaliane Bradley is the author of The Ministry of Time, which was an Observer Best of 2024 debut and has sold in 20 languages to date. She was the winner of the 2022 Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize and the 2022 V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize.
Avid Reader Bets Big on Kaliane Bradley's 'The Ministry of Time'
By Sophia Stewart | Jan 16, 2024
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Margo Shickmanter, executive editor at Avid Reader Press, was standing in line at the Seattle airport, about to board a flight home to New York, when an eye-catching email appeared on her phone. Not long before, some British editor friends had tipped her off to a much-buzzed-about manuscript that had just sold in the U.K. Now, the manuscript, for a debut novel by Kaliane Bradley called The Ministry of Time, was sitting in her inbox. It was March 4, 2023.
“I ended up reading the whole book over the course of the plane ride and stepping out into the airport in New York City totally galaxy-brained by it,” Shickmanter recalled. “Not only did I feel like I had barely blinked for the entire ride, I felt like I had never read anything like it.” She knew she had to acquire it.
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“Because I couldn’t face the prospect of not publishing this book once I’d read it, I decided I wanted to preempt it over the weekend,” she said, “something I’ve never done before or since.” But there was a hitch—Bradley’s agent, Chris Wellbelove of Aitken Alexander Associates in London, was away on vacation and wasn’t picking up his phone. “I spent the rest of the day resigning myself to the fact that it was going to be a long drawn-out competition.”
That Saturday, Shickmanter was in the shower when her phone rang. It was Wellbelove, who was in between courses at dinner in Mallorca. “I felt like I had no choice but to turn off the shower and sit in the tub with shampoo dripping down my face and tell him all the reasons why I loved the book and try to preempt it right then and there,” she remembered. “So now I can cross off making a business deal from the tub, I guess!”
Wellbelove wasn’t surprised by how impressed Shickmanter had been with Bradley’s work—he had been similarly captivated when he first encountered a short story of hers in a U.K. literary journal in 2016. Upon reading it, he wrote to Bradley about representation, and whenever she published a new story, Wellbelove would read it and write to her again. “Each time she’d patiently let me know that there wasn’t yet a project for an agent to work on,” Wellbelove said, “and I’d go back to waiting for the next story to publish, convinced that one day there would be a novel, and that when it did arrive it would be special.”
The first draft of The Ministry of Time arrived in late 2021. Bradley had spent the spring and summer nursing an obsession with historical polar exploration, and particularly the doomed Franklin expedition of 1845. She couldn’t help but write about it. “That first draft came very quickly”—in just 11 weeks—”because it was for fun,” Bradley said. The manuscript needed work when she brought it to Wellbelove, and the two worked on it together for just over a year. “I’m so glad we did that, and that Chris is the sort of agent who’s willing to put in the work,” Bradley said. “It’s a far better book for it.”
Part Outlander, part John Le Carré, The Ministry of Time imagines a near future in which the government is testing the viability of time-travel by transporting various people from history to the present. The speculative novel centers on a young civil servant, an unnamed woman, who is tasked with chaperoning Commander Graham Gore, a British explorer who died on the Franklin expedition, as he navigates contemporary life. Soon, the stakes of her assignment become much higher than she ever anticipated.
The book went out on submission in February 2023, which Wellbelove hoped “would put us a little ahead” of last April's London Book Fair. “There’s always a little trepidation when you send out a new book,” he said, “especially one by a debut writer.” But within just two days of submission, it had competing preempts in the U.K. Federico Andornino at Sceptre acquired it just before Wellbelove went on vacation at the start of March. “My plan was to make a U.S. submission once I got back,” said Wellbelove, “but Margo had other ideas.” (Adornino and Shickmanter edited the book together, which the latter said was “honestly a lot of fun.”)
Once the U.S. deal with Avid Reader was inked, things moved fast. The same weekend of Schickmanter’s bathtub phone call, the rights team at Aitken Alexander began fielding international offers, and by week’s end had accepted preempts from Autrement in France and Kagge in Norway, with ongoing auctions in Finland (won by TAMMI), Germany (Penguin Verlag), Italy (Mondadori), and Spain (Salamandra). “By the time the London Book Fair came around we’d closed in 14 or 15 territories, with almost every deal at auction or in a preempt,” Wellbelove said.
An auction for film and TV rights soon followed. “Ordinarily we might run the film and TV submission after most of the publishing side has been done, but after Margo’s preempt we decided to submit right away, largely to try and contain the number of companies offering,” Wellbelove said. “That plan did not work.” After a 21-way auction, with bidders from the U.K. and U.S., a television adaptation is now underway. Wellbelove was unable to comment further but said that further details would be available in "the not-too-distant future."
The team at Avid Reader has not been at all shocked by the response to The Ministry of Time, which will publish in the U.S. on May 7. Associate director of publicity Alexandra Primiani, who is heading up the campaign for the book, calls it “effortlessly readable, all while displaying the best parts of genre and literary fiction.” Her publicity efforts hinge on strategically targeting critics and reviewers, particularly of genre fiction. The publisher will be putting serious marketing muscle behind the book: the Simon & Schuster sales force selected it as the season’s pick for Top Shelf, a company-wide title discovery program that spotlights one book per season to get behind and break out with bookstores, consumers, and the industry. (Previous Top Shelf picks include Zakiya Dalila Harris's The Other Black Girl and Jesmyn Ward's Let Us Descend.) And on the publicity side, ARC mailings will include what Primiani calls “highly designed, impressionable pieces of ephemera—including some swag items we've never produced for any prior books.”
Wellbelove is still glowing from the industry response. “I don’t think an agent ever expects a submission to go as well as this one eventually did—this kind of outcome is very rare,” he said, “and I think speaks to the number of different readers the book might be for.” Bradley, too, understands that her experience as a debut author has been anomalous: “In some ways, the sheer dream-come-true quality of the whole process is the hardest part; I know the likelihood of everything lining up like this again is close to nil.” Nevertheless, she is savoring her success in the present: “I still wake up in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep because I’m so excited that my novel is going to be published.”
The Ministry of Time
Kaliane Bradley. Avid Reader, $28 (352p) ISBN 978-1-6680-4514-5
The clever debut from British Cambodian writer Bradley features time travel, romance, cloak-and-dagger plotting, and a critique of the British Empire. The unnamed narrator, who works as a translator for Britain's Ministry of Defence sometime in the near future, is selected by the government to aid a newly formed agency to process time travelers from the past. Her assigned "expat" is real-life polar explorer Lt. Graham Gore, who has arrived in the future sometime before his death during the ill-fated 1845 Franklin expedition, a mind-bender Bradley heads off at the pass ("Anyone who has ever watched a film with time-travel... will know that the moment you start to think about the physics of it, you are in a crock of shit"). The narrator, whose mother was a Cambodian refugee, feels a kinship with Gore's sense of disorientation. The roguishly handsome naval officer lives with her as part of the terms of the assignment, and her account of their burgeoning mutual attraction is interspersed with episodes from Gore's disastrous journey to the Arctic. A thriller-like scenario regarding mortal threats to the narrator and Gore feels secondary; more fruitful are Bradley's depictions of the ways in which time travelers react to modern nightclubs, sexual freedoms, and the news that the empire has "collapse[d]." It's a sly and ingenious vehicle for commentary on the 21st century's disruptions and displacements. (May)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"The Ministry of Time." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 10, 11 Mar. 2024, p. 36. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A787043873/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=14c3c9e6. Accessed 5 Apr. 2024.
Bradley, Kaliane THE MINISTRY OF TIME Avid Reader Press (Fiction None) $28.00 5, 7 ISBN: 9781668045145
A time-toying spy romance that's truly a thriller.
In the author's note following the moving conclusion of her gripping, gleefully delicious debut novel, Bradley explains how she gathered historical facts about Lt. Graham Gore, a real-life Victorian naval officer and polar explorer, then "extrapolated a great deal" about him to come up with one of her main characters, a curly-haired, chain-smoking, devastatingly charming dreamboat who has been transported through time. Having also found inspiration in the sole extant daguerreotype of Gore, showing him to have been "a very attractive man," Bradley wrote the earliest draft of the book for a cluster of friends who were similarly passionate about polar explorers. Her finished novel--taut, artfully unspooled, and vividly written--retains the kind of insouciant joy and intimacy you might expect from a book with those origins. It's also breathtakingly sexy. The time-toggling plot focuses on the plight of a British civil servant who takes a high-paying job on a secret mission, working as a "bridge" to help time-traveling "expats" resettle in 21st-century London--and who falls hard for her charge, the aforementioned Commander Gore. Drama, intrigue, and romance ensue. And while this quasi-futuristic tale of time and tenderness never seems to take itself too seriously, it also offers a meaningful, nuanced perspective on the challenges we face, the choices we make, and the way we live and love today.
This rip-roaring romp pivots between past and present and posits the future-altering power of love, hope, and forgiveness.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Bradley, Kaliane: THE MINISTRY OF TIME." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A784238505/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=bd951dd0. Accessed 5 Apr. 2024.