Just One Damned Thing After Another

A WWII nurse walks through standing stones into Jacobite Scotland—and a complicated love story.

Hartford mechanic Hank Morgan is knocked cold in 1879 and wakes in King Arthur’s Britain, where nineteenth-century know-how—and a timely eclipse—raise him from condemned outsider to the Boss of Camelot, until knights, the Church, and a war of the future tear the miracle apart. Mark Twain’s novel is medieval time-slip historical adventure: a Yankee’s satire of chivalry, progress, and the damage a modern mind can do in a legendary past.

A Highland glen’s stories across centuries of saints, strangers, and secrets (Walter Scott Prize 2022).

In July 1942 Paris, ten-year-old Sarah Starzynski is arrested with her parents in the Vél' d'Hiv roundup—but not before she locks her little brother in a cupboard, promising to come back. In 2002, American journalist Julia Jarmond, assigned to the sixtieth anniversary, traces Sarah’s apartment into her own French in-laws’ history. Tatiana de Rosnay’s novel is WWII dual-timeline historical fiction of occupied Paris, a child’s promise, and a family secret that will not stay buried.

Yale historians reconstructing a fourteenth-century Dordogne fortress are sent by a quantum company into 1357 to rescue their professor—and land in the Hundred Years’ War among knights, a hidden crypt, and the siege of Castelgard and La Roque they had only studied in the dirt. Michael Crichton’s 1999 novel is medieval time-slip historical fiction of chivalry, quantum travel, and scholars who have to survive the past they came to map.

Oxford historian Kivrin Engle is sent from 2054 to study 1320—and arrives instead in 1348, in a village where the Black Death is about to come down the road, while an influenza epidemic in future Oxford strands the team that might bring her home. Connie Willis’s Hugo- and Nebula-winning novel is medieval time-slip historical fiction of plague, faith, and a young woman nursing a parish through the end of the world.