This extraordinarily powerful and poignant time-travel novel won both the 1992 Nebula and the 1993 Hugo Awards. Academic politics, the Christmas holidays, and a devastating flu epidemic conspire to trap Kivrin, a mid-21st-century undergraduate Oxford historian, in 14th-century England during the outbreak of the bubonic plague. As the reader follows the parallel narratives of Kivrin's experiences in the past and of her mentor's attempts to locate and rescue her, it becomes clear that, even in the future, the ravaging effects of both disease and small-mindedness are difficult to defeat.