#108. DOOMSDAY BOOK By Connie Willis

Published : 1992
Pages : 587
Overall Mark : 9/10

When Kivrin Engle travels back through time to complete her doctoral thesis, due to an accident, she lands in the middle of the Black Plague of 1348.

Meanwhile the Oxford she left behind is laid low by a mysterious strain of influenza and, with no-one willing to risk arranging her rescue, time is running out…

CONNIE WILLIS (1945-)
Connie Willis has won, among other prizes, ten HUGO Awards and six NEBULA Awards for her writing. She lives in Greeley, Colorado with her husband Courtney Willis, a professor of physics at the University of Northern Colorado.

VERDICT
This is a well written and well rounded tale that creates two worlds and a collection of characters who are both likeable and believable. Willis manages to bring us a story of medieval England that gives us characters who, rather than being the stereotypically evil people we would normally associate with the period, are so real that it becomes quite depressing when the plague inevitably ctaches up with them. This is one of the best SF Masterworks I've read in a good while.