Connie Willis: The Doomsday Book

The Doomsday Book simultaneously tells the stories of a student and her tutor separated by seven hundred years yet living a parallel experience.
In the near future a young historian with a passion for the middle ages is given the opportunity to travel back through time to the fourteenth century. She has researched the period extensively, finds it fascinating and against her tutor's advice decides to undertake the field study.
Things go wrong and although she is in the right place, she is in the wrong time. Instead of the relative safety of 1320 she finds herself in plague riddled 1348.
The mistake in her temporal destination isn't discovered by her support team who are caught up in a deadly influenza epidemic that has the entire city quarantined. Both the student in the fourteenth century and the tutor in the modern world have the truth brought home to them that behind the dispassionate statistics and probability forecasts are real people with hopes, dreams, fears and petty grievances that are no different in essence to their own.
It took me a long time to pick up this book. At nearly seven hundred pages the thought of the time commitment of reading it put me off. I wish it hadn't. Once I started it I quite enjoyed The Doomsday Book.
Willis makes the near future technology believable without getting bogged down in, potentially boring, detail about how it works (something many futuristic writers tend to do to the detriment of the story). She draws a great picture of the practicalities of life in the middle ages and overlays it with characters who have completely recognizable personality traits without giving them modern sensibilities.
At the same time she maintains the suspense and drama of the more modern period using bureaucracy at its most incompetent and time pressure to great effect.
The ending did feel a little contrived and I would have been just as satisfied with a different outcome but that's a small point and was more than made up for by the quality of the rest of the book.
This is a stand alone book, though Willis has others set in the same universe, and while I would not go out hunting for them should one cross my path I would not hesitate to read it. - Lynn