In London, 1969, Jeffrey Mercier is just an ageing department store clerk with a long buried secret and a distant memory of a lost love, but when he is suddenly shanghaied by a woman who claims that she can travel in time, his dismal days in menswear are finally cut short. Jeff steps out of his timeline and into a whole new world of possibility and adventure, only to find that he is once again the automaton employee of yet another large corporation: The Time Agency. It has become his duty to protect the people of the future from the threats of their past. Under the guidance of the struggling captain Marie-Elizabeth Giraud, Jeff learns that he has more in common with his fellow time traveller than he knows. As the adventurers exchange their tales of life and romance in times gone by, their popularity slowly grows in the media-mad atmosphere of the 27th century and Jeff discovers more about his past than he ever thought possible. But all is not well in the timeline, and these intrepid time agents are about to find themselves at the centre of a disaster that could destroy the universe, perhaps even time itself.