In her first novel since 2002, Nebula and Hugo award-
winning author Connie Willis returns with a stunning,
enormously entertaining novel of time travel, war, and the
deeds—great and small—of ordinary people who shape history.
In the hands of this acclaimed storyteller, the past and
future collide—and the result is at once intriguing,
elusive, and frightening.
Oxford in 2060 is a chaotic place. Scores of time-traveling
historians are being sent into the past, to destinations
including the American Civil War and the attack on the
World Trade Center. Michael Davies is prepping to go to
Pearl Harbor. Merope Ward is coping with a bunch of bratty
1940 evacuees and trying to talk her thesis adviser, Mr.
Dunworthy, into letting her go to VE Day. Polly Churchill’s
next assignment will be as a shopgirl in the middle of
London’s Blitz. And seventeen-year-old Colin Templer, who
has a major crush on Polly, is determined to go to the
Crusades so that he can “catch up” to her in age.
But now the time-travel lab is suddenly canceling
assignments for no apparent reason and switching around
everyone’s schedules. And when Michael, Merope, and Polly
finally get to World War II, things just get worse. For
there they face air raids, blackouts, unexploded bombs,
dive-bombing Stukas, rationing, shrapnel, V-1s, and two of
the most incorrigible children in all of history—to say
nothing of a growing feeling that not only their
assignments but the war and history itself are spiraling
out of control. Because suddenly the once-reliable
mechanisms of time travel are showing significant glitches,
and our heroes are beginning to question their most firmly
held belief: that no historian can possibly change the past.
From the people sheltering in the tube stations of London
to the retired sailors who set off across the Channel to
rescue the stranded British Army from Dunkirk, from
shopgirls to ambulance drivers, from spies to hospital
nurses to Shakespearean actors, Blackout reveals a side of
World War II seldom seen before: a dangerous, desperate
world in which there are no civilians and in which
everybody—from the Queen down to the lowliest barmaid—is
determined to do their bit to help a beleaguered nation
survive.
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