Centers on a man with a time-traveling gene that allows him to appear and reappear to his true love at different points in her life. This is the remarkable story of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who travels involuntarily through time, and Clare Abshire (McAdams), an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare's passionate love affair endures across a sea of time and captures the two lovers in an impossibly romantic trap, and it is Niffenegger's cinematic storytelling that makes the novel's unconventional chronology so vibrantly triumphant.