A recently established government ministry studying time travel is gathering "expats" from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible--for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time. A civil servant is tasked with working as a "bridge": living with, assisting, and monitoring the expat known as "1847" or Commander Graham Gore, who according to history, died on Sir John Franklin's doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic. Over the course of an unprecedented year, Gore and the bridge fall haphazardly, fervently in love, with consequences they never could have imagined.