Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

He turned and stared blindly at the thin-glass. "I told her then that she couldn't go."

Synopsis -

For Kivrin, preparing to travel back in time to study one of the deadliest eras in humanity’s history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the fourteenth century and inventing an alibi for a woman traveling alone. For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant painstaking calculations and careful monitoring of the rendezvous location where Kivrin would be received.

But a crisis strangely linking past and future strands Kivrin in a bygone age as her fellows try desperately to rescue her. In a time of superstition and fear, Kivrin—barely of age herself—finds she has become an unlikely angel of hope during one of history’s darkest hours.

Review - 

I first read Doomsday Book around 2001-2002, and was blown away. In 2003 when SARS shut down the Toronto airport, I have to admit being a little freaked out as it brought this story to mind.  I have re-read this book every few years as it is my favorite title by this author, so it was still fresh in my mind when the COVID pandemic shut down the world in 2020.  This time the pandemic was real and in many ways the journey in the present time mirrored the image of the world share in Doomsday Book. Life and art joined hands. 

While the story is definitely Science Fiction, involving an alternative future where time travel is used by universities to do historical research, the author is a wonderful story teller. Here she spun a tale that will appeal to a wide range of fiction readers.  Other than time machine and time travel, the characters, settings and lives they live are well feel very familiar. And the author brings the past alive. We walk with the characters through their normal lives, seeing them through the eyes of the researcher - Kivrin. It is a bit like watching movie.  When the Black Death descends upon the village Kivrin was doing her research in, we experience the devastation through her.  

I love this book and will be it reading again and again. 

Buy the Book: Amazon USA ~ Amazon CA

Meet the Author -

Connie Willis has won six Nebula Awards (more than any other science fiction writer), six Hugo Awards, and for her first novel, Lincoln's Dreams, John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Her novel Doomsday Book won both the Nebula and Hugo Awards, and her first short-story collection, Fire Watch, was a New York Times Notable Book. Her other works include To Say Nothing of the Dog, Bellwether, Impossible Things, Remake, Uncharted Territory and Miracle and Other Christmas Stories. Ms. Willis lives in Greeley, Colorado, with her family and is hard at work on her next novel, Passage.