I was really worried that this would be super boring, but it turned out to be a dark academia pandemic/plague novel. 

In a future Oxford, historians can time travel, gather data, and come back. Time travel has many rules and technicalities - there's paradox laws to work with, vaccines to take, and calculations to check and recheck and then check again. These are extensively detailed in the book, and I warn that some may find them boring and repetitive. 

In fact, a lot about this book could be very grating. In this future Oxford, phones have video chat but aren't portable and no one ever answers them when they need to be answered. And there's pages upon pages of dry British humor, references to a student reading Petrarch when he is in fact Netflix and chilling, and a 12 year old boy who is irritating, eating a gob stopper, and thinks everything is apocalyptic. There's also a choir of American bell ringers and an archaeologist trying to save her flooding dig (if anyone cares!!). 

Against this backdrop, our young protagonist, Kevryn, is determined to go back to the early 1300s. It's a risky drop. Historians typically don't travel that far back, and traveling as a woman, alone, is at best suspicious and at worst catastrophic. But she insists, and her chapters are a delight to read. She settles into a small village and finds both allies and enemies. I won't spoil the charming characters for you, but know that there are a few memorable ones (Agnes and Roche especially, like come on) who are worth getting to know. 

But Kevryn arrives sick with fever. And the technician who sent her back in time, still in future Oxford, also collapses from a mysterious illness. Disease spreads in parallel in both settings, and a lot of people spend a lot of time being very sick. The descriptions are graphic, so be warned. 

The pace of this book allows for such an excellent exploration of themes, characters, archetypes, images, culture... Because of the constant reflection on death and illness, discussion of religion features prominently in this book in a way I found remarkably well done. 

I didn't know where else to fit this but: bells. Lots of bells. Agnes' little Christmas bell, the time travel bells, the funeral bells, the American bell choir. Everyone has to ring their own bell. Bells!!!

I can think of so many reasons that this book wouldn't land with people, but I found it near perfect. Through its technicality, repetitiveness, side plots, slow pace, and grotesque descriptions of sickness, the book lived and breathes. In other words: while things occasionally pulled due to being repetitive, this also had everything I could hope for in an epic time travel story. 

Highly recommended if you're into slow paced sci fi with great characters, are prepared for a chonker where lots of things happen but in a (possibly frustrating) way, and are looking for a great audiobook experience. I can't wait to read more of Willis. 4.75 on SG rounded up to 5 on GR.