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jacey
Audiobook narrated by Jenny Sterlin.
First published in 1992, this is set in the (then) near future with time travel, and doesn’t to a bad job of anticipating what a future Oxford and Oxford University would be. Oxford’s history students can go back to the past to see what life was really like in (say) Victorian England, or the 20th Century, but some centuries are considered too dangerous, and the further back you go the more slippage you can expect – from a few hours to a few years, thus not landing exactly when you expected to. Kivrin Engle, a medieval history student requests a trip back to 1320 to experience the middle-ages in the years before the Black Death. Her immediate professor (James Dunworthy) is reluctant but Kivrin (under the auspices of Prof Gilchrist) goes anyway. Unfortunately, the techie on the jump immediately falls ill with a new strain of influenza just as he discovers something is wrong with Kivrin’s jump. Instead of 1320 Kivrin ends up in 1348, the year the plague reaches Oxford. She doesn’t realise this at first, but she has the Oxford flu when she lands, is cared for at a small manor and feigns amnesia to get by, as she realised the middle English she’s learned is not nearly sufficient for every day communication. The book takes place in two timelines, Kivrin and her experiences with life and plague in the 14th century and Dunworthy and co. with a potential pandemic in the book's (near-future) present with Oxford under quarantine. Gichrist’s interference strands Kivrin in the past. She’s been vaccinated against the plague, but unfortunately her new 14th century friends are oh-so susceptible to it. This won the Hugo and Nebula awards when first published. It might be a touch dated now as you might expect from anything near-future written over a quarter century ago, but by and large it works, except Colin the teen boy character sucks gobstoppers and gets a ‘muffler’ for Christmas. Jenny Sterlin does a decent job on the narration, though she does make the professors Dunworthy and Gilchrist sound more like they’re from the 1940s rather than the 21st century, and she insists on pronouncing Caudhuri (the techie) the way it's written. (My dentist pronounces it Chow-dray, and he should know.)
