#DOOMSDAY BOOK SERIES#

And that she isn’t actually in 1320, like she assumed…. They care for Kivrin when she is horribly ill and it takes Kivrin some time to realise why they are all so isolated.

Meanwhile after her “drop”, Kivrin is found and transported to the house of the local Lord, although the Lord himself is not in residence: it’s his wife, their two young daughters and the Lord’s mother, who is constantly at odds with her daughter-in-law. This can be by just a few hours but there are other things that can go wrong too and no one is able to re-run the coordinates and he cannot speak to the unwell scientist, who drifts in and out of consciousness and is made delirious by his fever, making it impossible to pick what is rambling and what is truth he’s desperately trying to communicate. For Dunworthy, this complicates retrieval of Kivrin if no one is around to facilitate bringing her back and he’s worried about “slippage” which is the potential for the time the person is sent back into to be miscalculated slightly. The virus attacks quickly and violently and at first proves difficult to sequence and doesn’t really respond to the treatments of the viruses they think it might be similar to. In the 2054 timeline, James Dunworthy is worried sick about Kivrin and the things that could potentially harm her, especially when the scientist in charge of “sending her back” comes to breathlessly find him and say something went wrong, before collapsing with a virulent influenza that quickly has the area quarantined, to contain what is potentially, another pandemic like the one that swept the globe at some time in the 21st century. 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.

#DOOMSDAY BOOK SERIES#

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.

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.

Doomsday book