Kaliane Bradley Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Kaliane Bradley is a published author and an editor. The British-Cambodian artist resides in London.

She has had her short fiction works be featured in publications such as Electric Literature, The Willowherb Review, Somesuch Stories, Extra Teeth, and Catapult, as well as others. She also won the Short Story Prize of 2022 from Harper’s Bazaar and the V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize in 2022.

Her debut novel The Ministry of Time was picked by many independent bookstores across the country to be part of the May 2024 Indie Next List. The book follows along with a civil servant who has been given the job of monitoring a man who has been plucked from his own time into the modern era named Commander Graham Gore. The civil servant ends up finding out much more than she originally intended to discover.

Kaliane chose the expedition and Graham Gore as the focus of this book. She was watching “The Terror”, a television show that was first on in 2018 and that she was watching in 2021 and lockdown. The show was good, but the author said that she was having a hard time figuring out what was going on since her brain was being affected by lockdown.

She thought that she wasn’t sure what was going on in the show, and that a lot of characters looked the same. She looked up the fan wiki online and found out that there was a man named Graham Gore and she thought that the guy seemed competent and nice and chill after reading about him on Wikipedia. The year was 2021, and Kaliane says that she couldn’t get her VPN to work and was stressed (the VPN was for her job). She started thinking that Gore could get the VPN working and could handle the lockdown and be just fine without any problems. That was why she started to get latched onto the character.

Then the author found an online community of people who appreciate polar exploration. Many of them were into the Franklin Expedition, or a tv series, or historical expeditions. Kaliane found that she got into it deeply, obsessed by the fact that the British Empire was sending people to the Arctic and they were dying in silly ways due to being unprepared or approaching the elements haphazardly. She also finds the fact that over a hundred man vanished and the ships weren’t found until 2014 and 2016, wondering what happened at the time.

Kaliane decided to have a protagonist that did not have a name because she decided that the bridge narrates a lot of the book, so doesn’t need to give herself a name to herself since she is the center of her world. But then there are the people that she is invested in, with the expats with full names since they are her surveillance subjects. Then there are people she relates to that she doesn’t use surnames for. Then there are those not thought of people, just being essentially their jobs.

The novel itself shows a balance of thrilling scenes and cozy scenes. The author says that it was difficult to achieve that balance, and the book that was published is the ninth draft. When Kaliane first began writing, she was just silly and having fun, attempting to amuse friends. Then she continued writing and started to realize that the story was coming in on the characters and she had to write it. She got partly through the draft and realized she had to deal with it and redraft.

The adaptation for The Ministry of Time has been picked up by the BBC, commissioning A24 to produce it. The book is on its way to being made into a visual medium and Kaliane feels like the process is nuts. Bradley has also worked as an editor at Penguin Classics and has been in the publishing world for some time. She was a bookseller prior to working in publishing. She has also worked at Waterstones as well as Charing Cross Road in London, a place with many indie and secondhand book shops. She also worked at Any Amount of Books, a secondhand bookshop, for six years and saw how indie bookshops have become center hubs for the community.

The Ministry of Time is a New York Times best-selling novel by Kaliane Bradley. The 2024 novel was a Good Morning America Book Club pick. This is a look into power and how love can change it all, as well as being a spy thriller, workplace comedy, and a time-travel romance. If you have been searching for something new and interesting to enjoy, check this book out and see what you think!

At some time in the future, a civil servant gets the chance to have a dream salary. Not long after, she is being informed the project that she is going to be worked on. There’s a government ministry that has just been established that is gathering up people referred to as ‘expats’ from all over history that will help to figure out whether time travel is possible not only physically but for space-time.

Kaliane is given the job of working as a bridge. She will live with, help, and monitor expat 1847, also known as Commander Graham Gore. Commander Gore is shown in history to have technically passed away on the trip of Sir John Franklin to The Arctic in 1845. He is a little off put by residing with a woman who is not married and shows off her calves all the time, and has new concepts existing all around him.

However, 1847 starts to adjust quickly since he loves to discover new things, continues to smoke seven cigarettes a day, and has a group of other expats to join him and give him support. The bridge finds out over the course of a year that this dynamic has become something even deeper.

The Ministry’s project will come to light, but in that time the bridge may have fallen down and in love. There are consequences she would have never thought of. Now the bridge must deal with choices that have brought them together and figure out what to do next and whether it can change the future.

Can you change history when you live with it? Find out the answer by getting a copy of The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley!