Doomsday Book

In the mid-twenty-first century, Oxford historians study the past by travelling into it. Kivrin Engle, a young medievalist, has talked her cautious supervisor, James Dunworthy, into sending her to the Middle Ages, an era the university's own safety rules rule out for students.

The trip goes wrong at once. As Kivrin leaves, the technician setting her coordinates collapses with an unidentified illness, and a flu epidemic puts Oxford under quarantine. Kivrin reaches the past sick and is taken in by a village household. She cannot be sure she has arrived at the right time or place, and she has no clear way home.

The book is science fiction that alternates between two crises. In the past, Kivrin has to conceal her identity, grow close to the household's children, and live through a deadly plague that reaches the village. Back in Oxford, Dunworthy works to find out what happened to her drop while the epidemic spreads, institutions strain and panic builds.

The novel opens Connie Willis's Oxford time-travel series. The novelette Fire Watch came before it, and To Say Nothing of the Dog follows. It took the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards in the best novel category (Locus for science fiction).