'The Ministry of Time' by Kaliane Bradley is our 'GMA' Book Club pick for May

This month, we are also teaming up with Little Free Library to give out free copies in Times Square and at 150 locations across the U.S. and Canada. Since 2009, more than 300 million books have been shared in Little Free Libraries across the world. Click here to find a copy of "The Ministry of Time" at a Little Free Library location near you.

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The interviewer said my name, which made my thoughts clip. I don’t say my name, not even in my head. She’d said it correctly, which people generally don’t.

“I’m Adela,” she said. She had an eye patch and blond hair the same color and texture as hay. “I’m the Vice Secretary.”

“Of . . . ?”

“Have a seat.”

This was my sixth round of interviews. The job I was interviewing for was an internal posting. It had been marked security clearance required because it was gauche to use the top secret stamps on paperwork with salary bands.

I’d never been cleared to this security level, hence why no one would tell me what the job was. As it paid almost triple my current salary, I was happy to taste ignorance.

I’d had to produce squeaky-clean grades in first aid, Safeguarding Vulnerable People, and the Home Office’s Life in the UK test to get this far.

I knew that I would be working closely with refugees of high-interest status and particular needs, but I didn’t know from whence they were fleeing. I’d assumed politically important defectors from Russia or China.

Adela, Vice Secretary of God knows what, tucked a blond strand behind her ear with an audible crunch.

“Your mother was a refugee, wasn’t she?” she said, which is a demented way to begin a job interview.

“Yes, ma’am.” “Cambodia,” she said. “Yes, ma’am.”

I’d been asked this question a couple of times over the course of the interview process. Usually people asked it with an upward lilt, expecting me to correct them, because no one’s from Cambodia.

You don’t look Cambodian, one early clown had said to me, then glowed like a pilot light because the interview was being recorded for staff monitoring and training purposes. He’d get a warning for that one.

People say this to me a lot, and what they mean is: you look like one of the late-entering forms of white — Spanish maybe — and also like you’re not dragging a genocide around, which is good because that sort of thing makes people uncomfortable.

There was no genocide-adjacent follow-up: Any family still there [understanding moue]? Do you ever visit [sympathetic smile]? Beautiful country [darkening with tears]; when I visited [visible on lower lid] they were so friendly...

Adela just nodded. I wondered if she’d go for the rare fourth option and pronounce the country dirty.

“She would never refer to herself as a refugee, or even a former refugee,” I added. “It’s been quite weird to hear people say that.”

“The people you will be working with are also unlikely to use the term. We prefer ‘expat.’ In answer to your question, I’m the Vice Secretary of Expatriation.”

“And they are expats from . . . ?” “History.”

“Sorry?”

Adela shrugged. “We have time-travel,” she said, like someone describing the coffee machine. “Welcome to the Ministry.”

I was thrilled to get the job. I’d plateaued where I was, in the Lan- guages department of the Ministry of Defence.

I worked as a translator - consultant specializing in Southeast Asia, specifically Cambodia. I’d learned the languages I translated from at university.

Despite my mother speaking Khmer to us at home, I hadn’t retained it through my forma- tive years. I came to my heritage as a foreigner.

I liked my Languages job well enough, but I’d wanted to become a field agent, and after failing the field exams twice I was at a bit of a loss for career trajectory. It wasn’t what my parents had had in mind for me.

When I was a very small child, my mother made her ambitions known. She wanted me to be prime minister. As prime minister, I would “do something” about British foreign policy and I would also take my parents to fancy governmental dinners.

I would have a chauffeur. (My mother never learned to drive; the chauffeur was important.) Regrettably she also drilled the karmic repercussions of gossip and lying into me — the fourth Buddhist precept is unambiguous on this—and thus at the age of eight my political career was over before it began.

My younger sister was a far more skilled dissembler. I was dutiful with language, and she was evasive, pugnacious with it.

This is why I became a translator and she became a writer — or at least she tried to become a writer and became a copy editor.

I was paid considerably more than her, and my parents understood what my job was, so I would say that karma worked in my favor. My sister would say something along the lines of: Go f--k yourself. But I know she means it in a friendly way, probably.

Even on the very day we were to meet the expats, we were still arguing about the word “expat.”

“If they’re refugees,” said Simellia, one of the other bridges, “then we should call them refugees. They’re not moving to a summer cottage in Provence.”

“They will not necessarily think of themselves as refugees,” said Vice Secretary Adela.

“Has anyone asked them what they think?”

“They see themselves as kidnap victims, mostly. Nineteen-sixteen thinks he’s behind enemy lines. Sixteen-sixty-five thinks she’s dead.”

“And they’re being released to us today?”

“The Wellness team think their adjustment will be negatively im- pacted if they’re held on the wards any longer,” said Adela, dry as a filing system.

We — or rather, Simellia and Adela — were having this argument in one of the Ministry’s interminable rooms: pebble-colored with lights embedded in the ceiling, modular in a way that suggested opening a door would lead to another identical space, and then another, and then another. Rooms like this are designed to encourage bureaucracy.

This was supposed to be the final direct briefing of the five bridges: Simellia, Ralph, Ivan, Ed, and me.

We’d all gone through a six-round interview process that put the metaphorical drill to our back teeth and bored. Have you now, or ever, been convicted of or otherwise implicated in any activity that might undermine your security status? Then nine months of preparation.

The endless working groups and background checks. The construction of shell jobs in our old departments (Defence, Diplomatic, Home Office). Now we were here, in a room where the electricity was audible in the light bulbs, about to make history.

“Don’t you think,” said Simellia, “that throwing them into the world when they think they’re in the afterlife or on the western front might impede their adjustment? I ask both as a psychologist and a person with a normal level of empathy.”

Adela shrugged.

“It might. But this country has never accepted expatriates from history before. They might die of genetic mutations within the year.”

“Should we expect that?” I asked, alarmed.

“We don’t know what to expect. That’s why you have this job.”

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From "The Ministry of Time" by Kaliane Bradley. Copyright 2024 by Kaliane Bradley. Reprinted by permission of Avid Reader Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.