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In the near future, a disaffected civil servant is offered a lucrative job in a mysterious new government ministry gathering expats from across history to test the limits of time-travel. Her role is to work as a 'bridge' - living with, assisting and monitoring the expat known as '1847', Commander Graham Gore, a member of John Franklin’s doomed Arctic expedition.

Along with his fellow 'expats' – extracted from the Great Plague, the Battle of Naseby, the French Revolution and the Battle of the Somme - Gore must be introduced to the internal combustion engine, women’s emancipation, computer dating apps, the smoking ban, and 21st Century cultural and social sensitivities. Among these are the narrator’s ambivalent feelings about her own mixed-race heritage.

The role of a Bridge, she discovers, may be well-paid, but it’s complex and difficult to navigate, particularly when the Victorian explorer sharing her living space is an attractive, infuriating, deeply sexy adventurer. When it becomes apparent that the very future is at stake, the job becomes both more complicated and more dangerous.

Episode 5: A traitor and a saboteur.

Kaliane Bradley is a British-Cambodian writer and editor who has won the 2022 Harper’s Bazaar Short Story prize and the 2022 V S Pritchett Short Story Prize. The Ministry of Time is her debut novel, widely acclaimed as exciting, clever, funny and gripping - ‘a little time-bomb of a book’ according to the writer Francis Spufford. It was shortlisted for this year’s Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize, and is a Sunday Times and New York Times best-seller. It also featured on Barack Obama’s reading list this summer.

The reader is Aoife Hinds, known for her roles in TV’s Derry Girls and Normal People.

Abridged and produced by Sara Davies
Production Co-ordinator: Sarah Tombling
Sound Designer: Matt Bainbridge
A Pier production for Â鶹ԼÅÄ Radio 4