To begin with, this is very much the approach Willis takes with the fourteenth century. Of course, as a Doctor Who fan I'm no stranger to time travel stories, and as the writer Steve Lyons has observed one of the most fascinating things about history from a storytelling perspective is that frequently previous centuries can be just as alien, incomprehensible and dangerous places to visit as any extra terrestrial planet. The story then shuttles back and forth between Kivrin's experiences in the fourteenth century, and modern Oxford where Dunworthy is convinced something has gone wrong with Kivrin's drop back in time, but all efforts to investigate the problem are hampered by an ever more serious outbreak of influenza.

Professor James Dunworthy, a veteran of several trips to the twentieth century reluctantly sees his star pupil Kivrin Engle off to the year thirteen twenty, three hundred years earlier than anyone had previously travelled to study the Middle Ages, a point in time with which she's fascinated. Being Christmas, I decided to read a Christmas themed novel, and me being the decidedly morbid person that I am, I decided to celebrate the festive season with a novel all about plague and pestilence, but (more appropriately for Christmas), a story of courage, suffering and very human frailty, one of my lady's favourites.ĭoomsday book begins in Oxford of 2054, a future in which historians do not just study the past, but use a time travelling device (rather confusingly for modern readers), known as 'the net' to travel back in time to view the past directly.

Doomsday book by connie willis