Doomsday Book

Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780739487136.

In the year 2054, students research the past by living in it. So when Kivrin Engle, a history student at Oxford, enters Brasenose Colleges time machine for transport back to 1320s England, no one anticipates any problems. But her two-week project takes a frightening turn. A mutant virus has been spreading through Oxford, and Kivrin arrives in the past delirious with fever. She is found and taken to a manor house, and when she recovers, she can no longer locate the time machine rendezvous point. As Kivrin struggles to adjust to a past thats not quite what she expected-a past where the Black Death is beginning to ravage a mystified, terrified population-the 21st-century virus is taking its toll on Oxford. With the only people who know where shes gone seriously ill themselves, will Kivrin ever find her way back to the future? Or has she become a permanent exile in a deadly time?