In Blackout, award-winning author Connie Willis returned to
the time-traveling future of 2060—the setting for several
of her most celebrated works—and sent three Oxford
historians to World War II England: Michael Davies, intent
on observing heroism during the Miracle of Dunkirk; Merope
Ward, studying children evacuated from London; and Polly
Churchill, posing as a shopgirl in the middle of the Blitz.
But when the three become unexpectedly trapped in 1940,
they struggle not only to find their way home but to
survive as Hitler’s bombers attempt to pummel London into
submission.
Now the situation has grown even more dire. Small
discrepancies in the historical record seem to indicate
that one or all of them have somehow affected the past,
changing the outcome of the war. The belief that the past
can be observed but never altered has always been a core
belief of time-travel theory—but suddenly it seems that the
theory is horribly, tragically wrong.
Meanwhile, in 2060 Oxford, the historians’ supervisor, Mr.
Dunworthy, and seventeen-year-old Colin Templer, who nurses
a powerful crush on Polly, are engaged in a frantic and
seemingly impossible struggle of their own—to find three
missing needles in the haystack of history.
Told with compassion, humor, and an artistry both uplifting
and devastating, All Clear is more than just the triumphant
culmination of the adventure that began with Blackout. It’s
Connie Willis’s most humane, heartfelt novel yet—a clear-
eyed celebration of faith, love, and the quiet, ordinary
acts of heroism and sacrifice too often overlooked by
history.
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