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In the year 2054, students research the past by living in it.
So when Kivrin Engle, a history student at Oxford, enters Brasenose College's time machine for transport back to 1320s England, no one anticipates any problems. But her two-week project takes a frightening turn. A mutant virus has been spreading through Oxford, and Kivrin arrives in the past delirious with fever. She is found and taken to a manor house, and when she recovers, she can no longer locate the time machine rendezvous point. As Kivrin struggles to adjust to a past that's not quite what she expected-a past where the Black Death is beginning to ravage a mystified, terrified population-the 21st-century virus is taking its toll on Oxford. With the only people who know where she's gone seriously ill themselves, will Kivrin ever find her way back to the future? Or has she become a permanent exile in a deadly time?
What are you reading this week? And what did you think of last week’s books? (3/19/2026)
...u enjoyed Kindred, @NanK . My all-time favorite is https://www.bookbrowse.com/bb_briefs/detail/index.cfm/ezine_preview_number/23648/doomsday-book The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. It's not only excellent sci-fi, but stellar historical fiction as well. It's probably the best time travel book I know of, right up there with https...
-kim.kovacs
What are you reading this week? And what did you think of last week’s books? (3/12/2026)
Last week I finished up Yesteryear for review here at BookBrowse. It was good, not great. It probably didn't help my opinion of the novel that I was expecting something different - more time travelly/historical fiction, like Connie Willis' Doomsday Book or Octavia Butler's Kindred. Yesteryear tur...
-kim.kovacs
What would your Desert Island Reads be, and why? (In the context of the novel, this is a book that has meant something special to you at a particular time in your life.)
@Janet_H1 have you read The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis? That's one of my all time favorites.
-kim.kovacs
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This information about Doomsday Book was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Constance Elaine Trimmer Willis has won, among other accolades, ten Hugo Awards and six Nebula Awards for her writing, and was recently named an SFWA Grand Master. She lives in Greeley, Colorado with her husband Courtney Willis, a professor of physics at the University of Northern Colorado.
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