Doomsday Book

Winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards and on most top science fiction book lists, this really is an excellent novel. It should appeal to anyone who loves historical fiction, despite some of the science fiction elements (i.e. near future science and time-travel). Viewed from one protagonist's experience in each timeline, a modern (2055 AD) flu epidemic runs parallel to the spread of the Black Death in 1348. It starts out a bit slow as the foundations for the characters and villages in each timeline are built. The author does an outstanding job developing each of the eclectic groups, with bits of humour sprinkled in. As each situation becomes more and more desperate, the pace of the book also increases with the distress of each character. The best part of the book is the way that the author is able to bring the reader to focus on the lives of the two small Oxford villages and their inhabitants as each deals with their crisis. When death comes, and it does in catastrophic mortality numbers, we view it through these small lenses which make it feel all the more devastating. It is particularly effective during Kivrin's (our modern time traveller) hopeless fight in the past to save her new acquaintances. Throughout it, she is fully aware of what is happening around her and the modern medical solutions that could work, but are unavailable in a century with no sanitation, no medicine and no idea how the disease spreads. By the end, she is emotionally shattered by it all and so is the reader.