Billed as “speculative fiction”, it is perhaps more cheering to think of this novel, as 50% sci-fi thriller, and 50% romcom. Ok, I don’t normally read romcom—it’s trite and formulaic— but this is sort of along the lines of ‘The Time Traveller’s Wife’ which was devourable, crossed with the ‘Hunger Games’. It does bog down a bit in the early stages and towards the middle, but the author has an extensive vocabulary and I enjoyed her occasional turns of philosophical phrase, even though the prose to describe the midway action is inelegant and undescriptive and at times, ranty. The smut action ramps up refreshingly about two thirds of the way through, and the end is stark and unpredictable.

‘The Ministry of Time’ feels a bit clunky plotwise, but is chiefly a love story between a disaffected civil servant working in a near-future London, and Commander Graham Gore, first lieutenant of Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated expedition to the Arctic. Gore, last seen grimly walking across the ice in 1847, has been retrieved from the jaws of death by a 21st-century government hellbent on testing the limits of time travel.

The Ministry has come by a portal from the future and is experimenting by going back through time and kidnapping people who are recorded as having died early in historical records. However, the sci-fi blasters and blue lights are minimal intrusions on the action.

Each ‘expat’, as they are called, has been assigned a “bridge”: part companion, part zookeeper, part researcher. The bridges share their homes, their lives – and perhaps more – but must file complete reports on every aspect of their new “friend” to an increasingly sinister HQ. The narrator, who never reveals her name, is Gore’s bridge. I find her hints of sexual attraction to him rather too vague seeing she’s telling us so much else.

Ursula K Le Guin wrote that the job of sci-fi was “to extrapolate imaginatively from current trends and events to a near-future that’s half prediction, half satire”. It is impossible to read The Ministry of Time and not feel that we are, in fact, mere years from “nose-bleeder” heatwaves, microchipped refugees and a government at war with itself.