Doomsday Book


Kivrin Engle is a promising young historian in 2054 determined to visit her chosen period of expertise: the 14th century. Problem is the Middle Ages have always been deemed too dangerous for direct study by Oxford’s history department, which uses a machine that will send people back only to times and places unlikely to create paradoxes. But Kivrin convinces a colleague to let her go anyway…


What Kivrin discovers is that her training has hardly prepared her for the reality she finds. She’s also not quite when she expected to be. Stranded in what she slowly realizes is the Black Death pandemic, she rises to the occasion as a loving caretaker for the small community she is in. But she knows she can’t stay forever. Meanwhile in 2054, an influenza pandemic hits Oxford, complicating efforts to bring Kivrin home and providing eerie parallels to her circumstances in the past.


Nearly 30 years ago, Connie Willis published Doomsday Book, the gripping, moving first novel featuring her now-beloved time-traveling Oxford historians, which went on to win the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards.

Connie Willis:

Although best known for his world-building Book of the New Sun science-fantasy saga, Gene Wolfe wrote brilliant fiction that resisted encapsulation within rigid genre categories. This volume collects twenty-eight tales spanning nearly a half century—six of them never before collected—and gathered from venues as varied as men’s magazines, periodicals devoted to short works of fantasy and science fiction, and tribute anthologies to the works of authors as wildly opposed in their literary visions as Dante and H. P. Lovecraft. Although selected for their overtones of “horror,” they frequently defy the conventions that contemporary category label conjures.


Take “Talk of Mandrakes,” a tale of malignant exo-biology spun from an ancient occult legend steeped in sex magic. Or “The Other Dead Man,” a story set aboard an interstellar spacecraft that would distinguish any anthology of zombie fiction it appeared in. “Innocent” is cast in the form of a dramatic monologue whose creepy first-person narrator details increasingly aberrant behavior that defies the formal psychological diagnosis it cries out for. And “In the House of Gingerbread” recasts a classic children’s fairy tale as a dark noir whodunit.


To be sure, Wolfe willingly embraced horror’s classic tropes, but he reworked them into remarkably original signatures through his personal creative ingenuity: There is much lycanthropy, but nary a hairy transformation in his futuristic “The Hero as Werwolf.” “The Vampire Kiss” reinterprets its titular monster as a scourge of the poor in Dickensian London. And in “Why I Was Hanged,” the disadvantages of accepting advice from the ghosts of the living are made abundantly manifest.


Their macabre inflections notwithstanding Wolfe’s horror stories abound with affecting character studies that cleave the distance between the horrible and the human: the changeling child adapting to an unfamiliar life as a mortal in “Queen of the Night”; the investigator in “The Detective of Dreams” dedicated by occupation to freeing his clients from their nightmares; the woman in “Uncaged,” whose feral persona may be an expression of her true self. Wolfe’s tales of horror, like all of his fiction, are stories in which readers—however uneasily—recognize, and relate to, much of themselves.


Limited: 1000 numbered hardcover copies

In 2001, Carlos Ruiz Zafon published 'The Shadow of the Wind', the opening movement in a four-volume cycle collectively entitled 'The Cemetery of Forgotten Books'.


Each of the four novels serves as both as both an independent narrative and a point of entry into the lives of a gallery of unforgettable characters, chief among them the Sempere family, booksellers eking out a living in the ravaged, war-torn city of Barcelona. Taken together, these four volumes form a kind of secret history of Barcelona, one dominated and symbolized by the eponymous Cemetery.


Zafon then sets that imaginary history against the larger history of a city—and country—torn by civil war and forced to endure nearly forty years of state sponsored terror under the Fascist regime of Francisco Franco. The resulting fusion of literature and politics, history and art, is one of the significant accomplishments of modern popular fiction.


On another, more personal level, these four books offer a profound and moving defense of the power of the imagination. Horrors abound in Zafon’s fictional universe, but so do their benign counterparts: love, friendship, family, ideas and, most centrally, stories.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon:

   First edition hardcover -signed/ ltd