In the mid 21st century, graduate students at Oxford learn about history by traveling back in time. After many preparations and precautions, Kivrin travels back to 1320s England. Unfortunately, she contracted a mutant virus from her current timeline, and arrives in the past incoherent with fever, losing her rendezvous point for the trip back.
Kept me up at night. Turned my stomach. Most suspenseful book I’ve read in years. Time travel, academia, bureaucracy, a self-regulating time continuum, the brashness of youth versus the anxiety that only comes with age, loads of religious nutters you hate, one religious nutter you admire, and a ground level view of sickness and death hundreds of years apart. Connie put her characters through so much that if they survived, I wasn’t sure how they were going to live with themselves, in either century.
Recommended for anglophiles, time travel enthusiasts, and history buffs who favor the 1600’s. Recommended for everyone, actually. I loved this book!
“I wanted to come, and if I hadn’t, they would have been all alone, and nobody would have ever known how frightened and brave and irreplaceable they were.”