Sceptre pre-empts Bradley's debut amid a flurry of international interest

Kaliane Bradley’s debut The Ministry of Time has emerged as a strong contender for the book of this London Book Fair, with Sceptre acquiring in a 48-hour pre-empt, translation rights going in 13 territories and a “massive” film/TV auction currently underway.

Sceptre’s executive publisher Federico Andornino⁠—in one of his first deals since moving over from Weidenfeld & Nicolson⁠—bought UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, to the speculative novel from Chris Wellbelove at Aitken Alexander. US rights were also pre-empted by Margo Shickmanter at Avid Reader. Meanwhile, six of the 13 foreign rights deals went at auction or in a pre-empt, including Germany (Penguin), Italy (Mondadori) and the Netherlands (Prometheus).  

And at this writing, 21 studios and production companies were in an auction for film/TV rights, handled by Aitken Alexander’s Lesley Thorne.

The book is described as “The Time Traveler’s Wife meets David Mitchell meets Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, with an incredibly cinematic hook”. It centres around a civil servant in the Ministry of Time working as a “bridge”, where she liaises and helps people who have been expatriated from the past. When she is assigned a Victorian explorer, their relationship turns “from the strictly professional into something more; and...they are forced to face the reality of the project that brought them together. Can love triumph over the imperialist structures and histories that shape them?”      

Andornino, who moved from W&N in January as Carole Welch stepped down from the imprint after 35 years, called Bradley’s novel a “wildly original, impeccably imagined, beautifully written—and with a huge amount of heart. It’s gripping, thoughtful, smart, stunning at a sentence level, hugely romantic and really quite sexy”.

He added: “Simply put, this is an unforgettable reading experience, one that kept me glued to the page way beyond my bedtime (I finished reading at 2 a.m.).”

Bradley is an Anglo-Cambodian writer and editor based in London. Her short fiction and essays have been published widely and last year she won both the Harper’s Bazaar and V S Pritchett short story prizes. She said: “This is a dream come true. As soon as [Andornino] wrote to me about The Ministry of Time, I knew immediately that I’d found my ideal editor⁠—someone who could see the very skin and bones of the book, someone who understood its intentions with empathetic clarity.”

Sceptre will publish in summer 2024.