The title refers to a derogatory term the immortal characters use for normal humans, who are doomed to mortality because of their aging bodies.
She nevertheless decides to keep running away alone and meets Esther Little, an older woman who insists on giving her green tea in exchange for asylum.
Hugo Lamb, an amoral politics student at the fictional Humber College, Cambridge, encounters a beautiful woman at a choir rehearsal who calls herself Immaculée Constantin and tells him that immortality is possible.
At a local pub, he re-encounters Elijah D'Arnoq, a New Zealander he met in his first year, and persuades the aristocratic Jonny Penhaligon to join a poker match at the end of term.
Hugo has created a second bank account under the false identity of Marcus Anyder, an astrophysics student at Imperial College London, and has acquired nearly £50,000 through various illicit deeds, including selling his mentor's vintage stamps as he recovers from a stroke, and cheating his friends at cards.
His newest scheme involves manipulating Jonny into selling his father's Aston Martin Coda to a vintage car dealer he knows.
He then goes to Switzerland for the Christmas holidays where an attractive bar manager, Holly Sykes, catches his eye, and he tries to win her over with some small degree of success.
On 30 December, he receives a call from Cheeseman, who informs him that Jonny has committed suicide by driving his father's Aston off a cliff, with an inquest forthcoming.
In the morning, he receives a call from his father telling him that the police are looking for him, which he suspects is related to his most recent theft of vintage stamps.
Hugo, for the first time, falls in love, but discovers a postcard from Ed Brubeck, currently travelling around the world, and grows jealous.
Deciding that he has no chance of a long relationship with Holly and wary of the potential prosecution awaiting him back home, Hugo accepts.
On the journey, D'Arnoq and Pfenninger tell him that they, along with Immaculée Constantin, are Anchorites, a group capable of telepathy as well as putting people on "hiatus" (i.e., causing time gaps and memory loss) and stopping the ageing process.
During the wedding Ed is lost in the memories of his time in Iraq working with Aziz and Nassar, two Iraqis who take him into territory dangerous for foreigners and help him with interviews and photos.
Ed strikes up a conversation with Holly's great-aunt Eilish, who lives in a remote part of Ireland called Sheep's Head.
The two split up to find her with Ed going to Brighton Pier believing Aoife has gone in search of Dwight Silverwind, a fortune-teller she saw earlier.
His latest novel has not sold well thanks to a brutally unfavourable review by Richard Cheeseman, now an established critic; he is estranged from his Canadian wife and two young daughters; and at a book fair, he is upstaged by new author Holly Sykes who has written an immensely popular book about her psychic visions called The Radio People.
Crispin also encounters a young Asian-American woman who introduces herself as Soleil Moore and hands him a book of her poetry which he promptly trashes.
At a literary festival in Colombia, Crispin decides to get his revenge on Cheeseman by putting cocaine in his suitcase and phoning in a tip.
On a trip to visit her in Iceland, he is attacked by the now-immortal Hugo Lamb who interrogates him about Holly, Esther Little, and what she knows about Horologists and Anchorites.
Cheeseman confronts him and tells him he spent his time in jail fantasising about killing Crispin, but at the climactic moment, he decides not to, and leaves.
Before he dies, Crispin sees spirals on the carpet, a dead spider between a filing cabinet and the wall, and a toy pirate with an eye patch, thus fulfilling Holly's prophecy.
Marinus (in her current form as Iris Fenby) contacts Holly and reveals herself to be part of a group of "atemporals" who call themselves Horologists.
The Blind Cathar, a heretic monk who willed the Chapel of the Dusk into being and has since become one with it, is the source of the Anchorites' rituals, and to destroy him and the temple would end their ability to prey on mortals.
It has been five years since a period called the Endarkenment, during which climate change brought about a depletion of resources, and people are now forced to live off the land combined with government rationing.
Over an argument on how to split their resources, the invaders begin shooting at each other, sparing most of the locals and leaving them time to form a small militia of their own.
Holly says goodbye to her grandchildren, knowing she will never see them in person again but resigned to her fate if it gives Lorelei and Rafiq a new beginning at life.
"The Bone Clocks is a novel desperately in need of an editor" the New York Times laments, with "supernatural nonsense" rendering it "arresting but bloated".