Ask a Bookseller: ‘The Ministry of Time’ by Kaliane Bradley

Looking for a novel you can pass around to your friends and family at the next gathering?Tiffany Lauderdale Phillips of Wild Geese Bookshop in Franklin, Ind., recommends Kaliane Bradley’s debut novel “The Ministry of Time.” She calls it a time-travel romance with a James Bond element, with beautiful writing and ideas that will leave you with plenty to talk about over dinner.The premise is that a ministry in England has decided to take five people from history who would have died and to plant them into modern-day England, ostensibly to study the feasibility of time travel. One is an Arctic adventurer from a doomed voyage, another was at the Battle of the Somme, etc. A “bridge” is assigned to live with each person and help them adjust to daily life. Our narrator is paired with the Arctic explorer, who has Victorian ideas about how a man and a woman living together should comport themselves.