Labyrinth

A Franciscan friar investigates murders in a labyrinthine abbey where books are power.

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.

In the London Library, researcher Roland Michell finds unsigned drafts of a letter from the Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash, traces them to the poet Christabel LaMotte, and with Maud Bailey follows a correspondence from their secret affair that the academy has never seen. A. S. Byatt’s 1990 novel is Victorian time-slip historical fiction of that affair’s 1859 crisis, and of the late-1980s academics who cross London, Yorkshire, and Brittany to possess the proof.

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.

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

Orphaned in eleventh-century London, Rob Cole learns the barber-surgeon’s trade on the road, then walks east—through Europe and the Islamic world—to study medicine at Isfahan, where Christians are barred and he must travel as a Jew to sit under Ibn Sina (Avicenna). Noah Gordon’s novel is medieval historical adventure of a healer’s apprenticeship: plague, faith, and a journey from Dark Ages England to the best medical school on earth.