![]() Where in the current timeline, another historian is excavating a dig from around the same time that Kivrin will be sent back to. She does find someone who is willing though, teaching her all she will need to know, she gets inoculated against everything that can kill her and prepares extensively for a trip to 1320 England, near Bath. Kivrin, a young historian, is desperate to experience the Middle Ages, despite the reluctance of Mr Dunworthy, her superior. Each century is graded in terms of difficulty or danger. The book is set in around 2054 and Oxford historians have found a way to send researchers back to centuries past so they can live in that era for a small amount of time (usually a week or two I think) and report back on what conditions were really like, especially in times where records might’ve been lost or incomplete. My library only has part of this series so I was able to borrow them from Marg recently and in preparation I read Fire Watch which is a sort of prequel to this and mentions Kivrin a lot and the trauma she is experiencing after her trip. ![]() I read Crosstalk by Connie Willis way back in 2016 I think and I’ve read a few others from her since then as well. ![]() I have been meaning to read this series for ages now. Connie Willis draws upon her understanding of the universalities of human nature to explore the ageless issues of evil, suffering and the indomitable will of the human spirit. 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.įive years in the writing by one of science fiction’s most honored authors, Doomsday Book is a storytelling triumph. For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant painstaking calculations and careful monitoring of the rendezvous location where Kivrin would be received.īut a crisis strangely linking past and future strands Kivrin in a bygone age as her fellows try desperately to rescue her. Together, they battle their invisible enemy with only the crudest weapons, and, when those inevitably fail, faith.Copy borrowed from Marg The Intrepid Readerīlurb : For Kivrin, preparing an on-site study of 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. Kivrin, who has been inoculated against the plague, helps the local priest, Father Roche, care for the dying in her adoptive town. As the plague scythes through the English countryside that winter of 1348, the bells ring until it seems they might never stop. They ring for holidays, they ring for weddings - and they ring for the dead, so that the sound might guide their souls to heaven. And yet, when I recalled Connie Willis' groundbreaking, Hugo Award-winning science-fiction novel Doomsday Book, the resonances came back to me with the sound of tolling bells.īells ring throughout Doomsday Book - they mark the hours in the small medieval village in which the time-traveling heroine Kivrin Engle has been stranded, awaiting rescue from her contemporaries in Oxford of the 2050s. It is hard for me to conceive of the bravery required to take care of people with this awful, contagious disease. Many sobering statistics have emerged from the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, but one number in particular has stuck with me: More than 200 health care workers have died so far. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Doomsday Book Author Connie Willis
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