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:

Passage:

A tunnel, a light, a door. And beyond it ... the unimaginable.

Dr. Joanna Lander is a psychologist specializing in near-death experiences. She is about to get help from a new doctor with the power to give her the chance to get as close to death as anyone can.

A brilliant young neurologist, Dr. Richard Wright, has come up with a way to manufacture the near-death experience using a psychoactive drug. Joanna’s first NDE is as fascinating as she imagined — so astounding that she knows she must go back, if only to find out why that place is so hauntingly familiar.

But each time Joanna goes under, her sense of dread begins to grow, because part of her already knows why the experience is so familiar, and why she has every reason to be afraid.

Yet just when Joanna thinks she understands, she’s in for the biggest surprise of all — a shattering scenario that will keep you feverishly reading until the final climactic page.