Obama’s summer reading list has dropped – and it includes my favourite new book

Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time is a romance, time travel thriller and romantic comedy novel all rolled into one.

Set in the near future, the British government has got its hands on a time travel portal and as part of an undisclosed mission, they’ve brought back five “expats” from history. Among the time travellers is Commander Gore, a 38-year-old Navy officer from the 19th century, who was part of Sir John Franklin’s doomed expedition to the Arctic. In real life, he died in 1847, but in Bradley’s genre-bending tome, he’s forced to acclimatise to the 21st century, while our nameless narrator, a disaffected civil servant, is assigned as Gore’s “bridge” to help him settle in.

Grappling with everything from aeroplanes, dating apps, the British Empire and iPhones, what follows is a girl-meets-boy (or Victorian-Arctic-explorer) love story and Doctor Who-esque thriller. Laugh-out-loud funny and a surprisingly powerful meditation on the climate crisis, it’s above all exciting, fun and a good old-fashioned page-turner that you’ll recommend to all your friends. So it’s really no surprise that Obama has it on his summer reads list.