She asks her instructor, Professor James Dunworthy, and the authorities that run the project to send her to Oxford in the year 1320. As the book opens, Kivrin Engle is a young historian who specializes in the medieval period. In cases of “slippage,” a slight shift in the precise time target will occur, with the time traveler arriving at the nearest suitable time and place to avoid creating a paradox, which can produce a window of variance between five minutes and five years. The time travel machine typically refuses to operate, making such trips impossible.

As part of the book’s premise, history resists any time travel that would alter the past by preventing visits to certain times and places. Doomsday Book is set in mid-twenty-first-century England at the University of Oxford, where historians conduct field observations using time travel. Her journey raises the ageless issues of good and evil and the will of the human spirit. Kivrin is forced to rely on herself in a time of great fear and superstition. However, when Kivrin finds herself amid a strange crisis linking the past to the present, her instructors must struggle desperately to rescue her.

As Kivrin receives inoculations against fourteenth-century diseases, her twenty-first-century instructors perform meticulous calculations to determine the rendezvous location in which she will be received. Written in 1992, Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book follows Kivrin Engle, a young historian who is preparing to study the medieval period by traveling into the past as an observer.

Doomsday book by connie willis