The government now has access to time travel technology. The novel is told in the first person from the perspective of an unnamed female civil servant of Cambodian heritage (for the purposes of this report I’ll refer to her as P for protagonist) who passes a vigorous interview process for a special assignment. Her interviewer is an eye patch-wearing senior operative named Adela, who looks like she has had a lot of cosmetic surgery. Her task; to be one of five “bridges”, helping one of five “expats” extracted from the past through a “time door”. Once extracted, the time door closes; no one can follow them, and they cannot go back to their original timelines. P’s fellow bridges are Simellia, Ralph, Ivan and Ed. The heroine’s expat is Commander Graham Gore, a real person, and member of the crew who sailed on the ill-fated voyages of the Terror and the Erebus ships in 1845. The other expats are Margaret (Maggie) Kemble, extracted from the Great Plague of London in 1665, Lieutenant Cardingham extracted from the Battle of Naseby in 1645, Captain Arthur Reginald-Smith, a soldier from 1916, and Anne Spencer, from Robespierre’s Paris – 1793. Expats are microchipped on arrival for tracking, and assessed regularly through psychological and medical tests.
The protagonist takes Graham to their assigned accommodation and begins to explain the concepts that underpin “how we live now” – TV, the internet, the first world war, gender equality, racism, and post- colonial discourse. She breaks the news that none of his fellow crew members from the Terror and Erebus returned from the Arctic. Graham starts to socialise with the other expats and demonstrates an ability to absorb modern concepts; he learns to cook and buys a motorbike. However, much of his behaviour is alien; he is an excellent hunter and kills all the squirrels in the garden with an air rifle, for example. P quickly realises she is attracted to Graham and betrays this to Adela during a routine polygraph test.
P loves spending time with her new housemate; they invite Margaret and Arthur to dinner and learn they are both homosexual and feel they have a chance for more freedom in their new lives. Graham and Arthur plan a holiday to Scotland to hunt deer. However, work quickly becomes far less pleasant. First,
P sees Adela with a mysterious figure known as the Brigadier. Graham tells her he saw a strange projection machine outside the ministry and draws her a sketch. P’s colleague Quentin tells her that Anne Spencer has stopped showing up on scanners, and that the MRI results for the expats are volatile. P tells Quentin she has found a microphone at home and is concerned the house is bugged; she becomes concerned when he stops responding to her emails. Simellia tells P she is unsure about the presence of the Brigadier and his apparent influence over the project. Adela tells P the Brigadier is a spy; they had been keeping him close to the programme to keep an eye on him, but he has now gone underground. She tells P that Quentin planted the bug in the house.
Graham begins to suspect he is being tracked in some way and realises P is monitoring his google searches, because she buys miso paste after seeing him search for it. P realises Graham has been collecting ministry equipment and making an effort to find out more about the ministry itself. At another dinner with Arthur and Margaret, they experiment with a theremin; a device which emits sound waves when someone moves their hand over the space around it. The device picks up the presence of the expats only intermittently. Graham asks P about her childhood, causing her to reflect on her mother’s stories after the fall of Phnom Penh, her relationship with displacement, and the racism she experienced growing up.
At a public graduation ceremony for the expats, Quentin appears behind P, telling her not to turn around. He tells her he planted the microphone in her house to work out whether the Ministry was watching her, and slips a piece of paper into her bag before being shot in the head, presumably by a sniper on a nearby roof. The piece of paper is an incident report revealing that the Ministry of Time accidentally stumbled across the time door and claimed it for their purposes; they did not invent the technology themselves.
Shortly after Quentin’s untimely death, Adela tells P Anne Spencer has been shot dead trying to escape Ministry wards, and that all other expats must be told it was suicide. P starts searching the ministry database for clues and finds someone is using her fingerprints to gain access to files and try to frame her. Graham and P grow closer through shared trauma; P is depressed and withdrawn after witnessing Quentin’s death and Graham’s faith in humanity has been compromised since he started reading about the Holocaust. P takes Graham to meet her friends and he charms them all. On the way home, they are ambushed by the Brigadier and his sidekick Salese, who are armed with futuristic weapons and say Graham needs to come with them. The pair escape on Graham’s motorbike and finally acknowledge their mutual attraction, marking the start of a blissful honeymoon period, with lots of careful instruction and context for Graham. P reports the incident with the Brigadier to Adela, who recommends she start carrying a gun and start doing target practice. P and Graham visit the Greenwich Maritime Museum to look at the artefacts recovered from The Terror and Erebus expedition. Graham is profoundly affected by the experience, saying “everyone I ever knew is dead”. P recalls her visit to Cambodia and her visit to the ruins of her family’s former home.
Adela summons P to the ministry and tells her there is a mole. She says “last time” it was Quentin, enigmatically. P and Graham find Arthur dead at home and Maggie missing; they suspect she is hiding in a half collapsed tunnel system outside London and find her there. P finally tells the expats they are microchipped and that the Ministry has always been able to track them; Graham is furious and feels deeply betrayed. P cuts the microchips out of them. P sends an SOS message to Adela; when she arrives the company are ambushed by the Brigadier and Salese. Salese reveals that Adela and P are the same person, but Adela is from a different (future) timeline. Adela stabs Salese and the Brigadier runs. Adela says she believes Salese and the Brigadier are from the 2200s (at which point Britain is involved in devastating war), and have used the time door to try and change history through targeted assassinations. Adela reveals she looks different to P because she had reconstructive surgery after the effects of time travel damaged her face, and says that in her timeline, Graham becomes a field agent and one of the
Ministry’s most prized assets, and that they have a son, Arthur. Her mission was to go back in time and ensure that P successfully helped Graham assimilate, because Britain needs ministry heroes for the War that is to come. The ministry killed off Arthur and tried to kill Maggie because they have no future as field agents. Adela gives P ministry passcodes and instructs her to destroy all records of the expat project, to keep the remaining expats safe. At HQ, she discovers a secret room where the time door is being kept. She also discovers Simellia was the mole, and has turned against the ministry after finding out what happens to sub-Saharan Africa in the future. The Brigadier appears near the time door; P tries to shoot the time door and it malfunctions; the Brigadier is now stuck in the past with no way home. The Ministry allows P to return home, unsure of the ramifications killing her will have. When she gets home, Graham is there and says he is taking Maggie away. He tells her Adela has died. P is put under house arrest and is then summoned for an exit interview; the Defence Secretary reveals Adela died when she shot at the time door. P is made redundant and goes home to live with her parents for a while. Once there, she receives a package from Graham; a copy of ROGUE MALE, his favourite contemporary book, with a note inside saying “of course I loved you”. The package is post-marked Alaska. P decides it must be time for a trip.
Throughout the novel, the action in the present is interspersed with a powerfully vivid account of Graham Gore’s time in the Arctic with the other men who sailed on the Erebus and the Terror. The account documents the rapid unravelling of the expedition despite the company’s experience in weathering extreme conditions; the men ran out of food quicker than anticipated, found very little to hunt, and the Inuits weren’t able (or perhaps unwilling) to help them. One by one, they froze and starved to death, and Graham would have died with them had he not walked through the time door.