Understanding the refugee experience, through a time-traveling British colonizer

NPR

This week Code Switch digs into The Ministry of Time, a new book that author Kailene Bradley describes as a romance about imperialism. It focuses on real-life colonizer Graham Gore, who was a Victorian polar explorer that died on a doomed Arctic expedition in 1847. But in this novel, Gore doesn't die. Instead, the British government has developed the ability to time travel and brings him from the Arctic into the 21st century. It's here that Gore is confronted with the fact that everyone he's ever known and loved is dead, that the British Empire has collapsed, and that perhaps he was not as good a person as he thought himself to be.

Bradley hopes that through this love story readers walk away understanding that anyone is capable of change, "for the better, [but] also for the worse. You can even take a colonist...who can look critically at his role and reconsider it."

This episode was hosted by B.A. Parker, produced by Christina Cala, and edited by Courtney Stein. Our engineer was Josephine Nyounai.