Connie Willis

A time-traveler is stranded in medieval Europe during the Black Death.

Doomsday book

The first chapter felt like it could have been made much shorter and made into a prologue; the second chapter was just boring, it didn't feel like things were going anywhere and just felt rather pointless.

THOU art I

Grace Edwards

So long. Often boring. But the last third was STUNNING.

Sarah Sammis

** spoiler alert **
           Doomsday Book (1992) by Connie Willis takes place in the same world as To Say Nothing of the Dog (1997). In 1993 it won a Hugo and Nebula and the Best Science Fiction novel from Locus Magazine.

Kivrin travels back to 14th century Oxfordshire at Christmas time. She's there to experience a mediaeval Christmas but influenza and later the blue illness puts Kivrin at risk. Meanwhile in 2054, her Oxford colleagues are dealing with their own influenza outbreak and are under quarantine to avoid another pandemic during the Christmas holiday.

The "Doomsday Book" of the novel's title is Kivrin's record of her travels. She originally calls it her "Domesday Book" after named after the survey commissioned by William the Conqueror in 1085. The book slowly transforms into the "Doomsday book" as events make Kivrin believe this book will be the record of her death.

With so many fantasy books where someone from the present travels to the past, the present-day hero usually can save the people of the past with his or her knowledge of "modern science." Connie Willis doesn't give Kivrin that power, nor does she make disease easy to beat in the future. Yes, the methods are more advanced but epidemics and pandemics are still possible.

Andrew John Kinney

Excellent time travel novel with decent historical accuracy regarding the plague in Europe.

Amy Thibodeau

I wasn't sure about this book for the first 20 pages. There were so many characters, and I wasn't really sure what was going on. But once I got past that initial bump, the other 500 or so pages were wonderful. The future, the past, the plague. It was exciting and touching and made a horrible historical time feel human and relatable (and I am not normally a fan of historical fiction). 

I cared about every character in this book and was deeply invested in what happened to them, especially Agnes, Rosemund, Father Roche, Kirvin, Dunworthy, Mary and Colin. And despite so many horrible things happening to them, it left me with with an echoing hope. The bells kept ringing. People keep trying. We shouldn't give up. 

With what's happening in our world with Ebola, this plot felt especially relevant. 

Highly recommend. Read it over the Christmas holidays. It would be perfect for that.

Janice Hopper

I think this is probably my 5th re-read of this book.

I bought the dead tree version in 1992/1993 when it came out. (From the original Borders store in Atlanta, before all the Borders expansion happened.) I've also listened to it in audio, but I don't remember when. And have probably read it at least once since then.

Since this is a novel about a plague and The Plague, it has an uneasy resonance right now in America, in the midst of a COVID-19 pandemic. And some of Ms. Willis' comments were a bit too on the nose. In one place, an American bell-ringer trapped in a quarantine zone around Oxford says to Mr. Dunworthy:

"I'm not used to having my civil liberties taken away like this. In America, nobody would dream of telling you where you can or can't go.

"And over 30 million Americans died during the Pandemic as a result of that sort of thinking, [Dunworthy] thought."

Yeah. Sure sounds familiar. Luckily we haven't had deaths in that range SO FAR. 

I think the last time I read this I was more aware of the slight datedness of the action. This was written before cell phones were common, and everyone's at the mercy of overladen phone systems. But knowing a pandemic situation as we now know it in 2020, the medical aspects were handled with AMAZING rapidity and efficiency. Willis' world in 2054 apparently had great gene sequencing and vaccine-making prowess.

So while the contemporary story is a modern deadly influenza outbreak, the historical story is of a modern woman set down by accident in the middle of arguably the worst disease outbreak in the history of humanity - the Black Death. Yeah, there were multiple Black Death outbreaks. This was the one in 1348. The historian heroine, Kivrin, unexpectedly finds herself 25+ years past where she thought she'd end up in her time travel research. She learns about the lives of the medieval folks (the "contemps" i.e., contemporaries of the time), finds much to love about them, and then has to see their world consumed by the plague.

It's still a good and affecting story. I was also a bit more aware of the religious implications in the writing than I have been before. I'm sure they were there all along, but as I've said before, I'm almost always a totally literal reader. Symbolism is a closed book to me. But every now and then, I can see a church by daylight. :D

It's a good story, though a bit dark for our times. That's exactly why I haven't yet been able to read Sarah Pinsker's first novel, A Song for a New Day. Too close to home.

This was for our SFF book club. Our next few books will actually be ones I haven't read before. Woohoo!

Naomi J.

Didn’t finish. Great concept that was badly in need of an editor. I’m working on giving up on terrible books (even if they’re lauded) as an exercise in valuing my time! :D

Sarah Escorsa

➽ Updated review here.



Original Super Crapstatic Review (OSCR™) back from when I was naught but a nefarious hatchling (anno domini 2005):

Time-travel fiction at its best! Instead of writing pages and pages on the scientific/technical aspect of time-travel, Connie Willis takes us back in time and brings the middle ages to life , much like Jack Finney did with the 19th century in Time & Again. Willis makes a vivid description of the Black Death, and of the hopelessness of life during the Plague. A brilliant book!

Melody Izard

This is full of time travel and it's philosophical rules and limitations - but there is not one cell phone. Creepy when current day surpasses futuristic science fiction. Of course I should forgive the author for not being able to predict the real future - but I can't forgive her for repeating things almost verbatim several times in the novel. A technique I assume writers use when they think their readers need reminding of key facts since the book is so long and complicated. There were times when I thought my cat had moved my book mark and I was re-reading a page I had already completed. 

I also got the feeling the time travel was just written in as an excuse to give the reader a history of Medieval England.

Anyway - good - but with limitations.

3.5 stars. 

All I can say is, I FINALLY finished this beast. It was entirely too long and the first half is pretty damn tedious. This easily could’ve been condensed into a 300 page book. It was also oddly repetitive, like Kivrin kept saying she needed to find Gawyn to find out where the drop was, even after she’d asked him and he didn’t give a satisfactory answer! Also there was an instance where (view spoiler)[Kivrin thinks a bubo should have been lanced hours ago, and it’s repeated 3 times in 4 page. Same bubo. Unnecessary! (hide spoiler)]

All that said, I loved most of the characters and got super attached to them. I think the characters are the strongest part of this novel, though the plot was super interesting. I just think the book suffered from having far too much repetition and unnecessary dialogue.

Casie Blevins

This book will stick with me for a long time.

For Kivrin Engle, preparing an on-site study of one of the deadliest eras in humanity's history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the fourteenth century and inventing an alibi for a woman traveling alone. For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant painstaking calculations and careful monitoring of the rendezvous location where Kivrin would be received. But a crisis strangely linking past and future strands Kivrin in a bygone age as her fellows try desperately to rescue her. In a time of superstition and fear, Kivrin - barely of age herself - finds she has become an unlikely angel of hope during one of history's darkest hours. Winner of the Hugo Award 1993 Winner of the Nebula Award 1993 "A tour de force" - New York Times Book Review "Ambitious, finely detailed and compulsivly readable" - Locus "It is a book that feels fundamentally true; it is a book to live in" - Washington Post

Doomsday book

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